How MSPs Can Leverage Automation for Better Business Results

By Willie Cash, Americas General Manager, Voleer at BitTitan

As IT service providers continue to navigate the challenges of this past year, many are looking for ways to improve their workload management and maximize revenue. While these objectives are nothing new, meeting them has become especially critical in 2020. The pandemic initially resulted in an increasing volume of work for MSPs and IT professionals, as many businesses continue to adapt to large-scale remote operations. But the spike is expected to fade.

In addition to pandemic-related challenges, IT work can be complicated and unpredictable. Service providers can’t foresee when a customer will be disarmed by ransomware, download malware, or know when a server will fail. Resolving these issues often requires hours of work that can be hindered by inefficient processes. Fortunately, there are tools that service providers can leverage to streamline workflows.

3 Challenges Service Providers Face

Three pressing challenges are recurring among MSPs and IT service providers. First, retaining a customer base has become more difficult amid the impacts of the pandemic. Economic slowdowns can result in business loss and reduced customer spending on IT projects. Therefore, MSPs are encountering more hurdles with trying to maintain their operations and serve clients while navigating economic uncertainty.

Secondly, as the market becomes crowded with competitors offering similar services, MSPs are having to fight for mindshare and the prospect of shrinking profit margins. To boost revenue, service providers must differentiate themselves from their competitors with superior service and new offerings, such as additional managed services or project-based services. And, ideally, these new offerings will be ones that deliver value to their staff as well as to the end customer.

Finally, service providers must be able to quickly respond to business needs to retain existing customers and gain new ones. For example, demand for services around Microsoft Teams has dramatically increased during the pandemic – and with the growing demand, users have bombarded the help desk with new questions and challenges they’ve experienced around this relatively young technology.

To be successful, service providers must stay one step ahead of technology-related needs – including feature changes or updates – and provide valuable guidance to customers. If service providers are caught flat-footed, it opens the door for customers to look elsewhere for IT services.

How Automation Fits In

To address these challenges, service providers routinely try to answer four common questions:

How do I do more with less? How do I give customers valuable insights into their business on a regular and recurring basis? Where are my customer gaps for challenges or inefficiencies to emerge – how do I get ahead of those gaps? And how do I stave off competitors?

Automation can alleviate some of the pressure on IT teams and make it easier for them to achieve their top business objectives. Essentially, automation allows MSPs to do more with less by implementing processes that eliminate labor-intensive manual methods, saving valuable time and work hours. Automated tasks can be scheduled and executed regularly – be it hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly – freeing up employee time for other valuable work.

Automated IT assessments and reports can provide insights into the health of a customer’s IT environment, as well as their usage patterns, rate of adoption, and security. Staying ahead of problems enables greater productivity, ensures better outcomes, and enables service providers to take proactive steps toward addressing issues before they reach a boiling point, a valuable service for customers.

Benefits To Be Realized

Service providers have a lot of different technologies at their disposal, but automation enables them to use those tools and technologies more efficiently.

For instance, with automation, service providers can reduce the time required to pull a plethora of information from various sources. Consider a security assessment. This may require a specialist to collect and compile information from several different interfaces and dashboards. It can be a deep, detailed process that requires a lot of work and time from a highly trained individual, creating an overreliance on a single employee.

However, by leveraging automation, the information for the security assessment and other cost optimization details can be pulled automatically and scheduled regularly. What once required between 12 and 13 hours of work can now be completed in a matter of minutes, saving valuable time and redistributing that specialist’s hefty labor hours to other high-value work.

Platforms like BitTitan’s Voleer offer automated reports and assessments that enable the collection, compilation, and dissemination of information, which can then be turned into actionable insights. MSPs can create custom automations that are proprietary to their firms, allowing them to offer better service to clients, gain more control over their workload, and grow revenue.

Areas To Target For Implementation

So, what are the ideal areas for implementing automation? Target tasks or scenarios that require repetitive steps for producing the desired outcome and that need to be scaled. These may be found in instances of Teams, Office 365, Microsoft Azure, and other such applications that require regular reporting and assessments.

Additionally, look for procedures or processes where all roads converge to one person or subject matter expert and employ automation where it is applicable. Leveraging automation enables more employees across the organization to take ownership of and execute these tasks, leading to greater productivity, scalability of services, and lower risks associated with overreliance on a single employee’s knowledge.

MSPs and IT professionals continue to face a range of issues, both old and new, in conditions that make addressing these challenges more demanding. By employing automation into their workflows, MSPs can create solutions that enable them to work more efficiently, so they can grow revenue and improve profitability as they travel the uncertain road ahead.

About The Author

Willie Cash is the General Manager of Voleer Americas at BitTitan, where he works with SMB and enterprise partner companies to identify and implement effective ways to drive solutions, grow revenue, and increase profits in their day-to-day businesses. Learn more about Voleer here.