[15] – CRM, Alerts, & Plugins

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts, Rae-Ann Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, me, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rae-Ann Buccianico. We are a PSA independent series designed to help MSPs worldwide on all things PSA.

You can get your questions answered by Rae-Ann and myself and learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing your efficiencies within your MSP. You can get in touch with us via our Facebook and LinkedIn group and on Twitter and on any of the other socials. We'll put some links to those in the show notes. With me today is Rae-Ann. How are you doing, Rae-Ann?

I'm doing great today, Chris. How are you? I'm very well. Thank you. Rae-Ann, what do we have on the agenda for today?

I've been wondering, how are you using the CRM piece in your PSA? Rae-Ann, I have a specific reason for asking. Other than just using it for sales opportunities, tracking opportunities, and that sort of thing, do you use it for storing customer notes or follow-ups or to-dos? How are you using your CRM package? Great question, Rae-Ann.

And of course, you know what I'm going to say, right? One of my favorite topics to talk about on the PSA. Of course it is. It's always my favorite, right? I'm always putting it in the PSA.

And actually, to be honest, this really is one of my favorites because I think it's such an underutilized part of the system. Most people will use the PSA tool for ticketing or for projects or some kind of service delivery stuff. But very few people actually use it to track their correspondence with their customers, to track leads and opportunities and all those kinds of things. And I said to you, and I actually said I wasn't going to do this on the record, but I actually am. I should really practice what I preach.

I don't often keep all of the notes of what I talk to customers about in the CRM, but I really think we should, right? I think it's something that, you know, it's designed for that particular reason. So every time you have any kind of correspondence with your customers to keep those notes in the CRM or even against the opportunity or any of those kinds of things. So I mean, what do you do in terms of that, Rae-Ann? So we've started using the CRM piece and the customer wall for notes.

And one of the things that we're doing now is we're following up. I have somebody in the office that is following up on accounts receivable and using Autotask to put into the notes that I've spoke with this person, they've promised payment on this date. You know, they set up a follow up or a to do so that they make sure that they follow up. And then if that customer does not make the payment on the date promised, then they go in to that customer, edit the customer, go to the alerts tab and put in alerts not to work on the account without prior approval until the customer pays their bill. So we're starting to use it a lot more than just tracking leads, tracking opportunities.

And as a sales funnel, we're now using it also more of a customer service administrative follow up tool. So I wanted to just reach out and see how other people were using it and whether or not there are some things that we could be missing or opportunities, forgive the pun, that we're missing in the CRM piece. That's a great conversation and great thing, Rae-Ann, is in terms of using the CRM you were mentioning about to do's, assigning to do's to people. You know, again, I think it's something that we should be using a lot more and it's designed exactly for that reason, right? So if you've got those multiple people within your company that are, you know, it's one person's job to follow up with a customer.

You might have that initial conversation with them. They say they're going to pay their bill. You then hand that over to accounts receivable and put it to do on the system for that person to actually go and contact that person or contact that customer at the time that you set the to do for them to do. So I think it's a really, really good way to use the CRM in the way that you're doing it. And I really like what you say about alerts because I think a lot of companies, a lot of MSPs out there don't actually realize that there is the alerts function within Autotask.

You know, something where you can put a big yellow bar across the top of the customer saying, hey, you know, this customer hasn't paid their bill. And then when you generate a ticket or if you're looking at that customer record directly in the CRM, it's got that big yellow bar across the top saying, you know, don't work with this customer, whatever the case might be. So and actually talking about that alerts thing, you know, even though it's called alerts, you know, I've seen that used in so many different instances. You know, maybe, you know, maybe you're going to have to get somebody's approval at your customer before you can create the ticket for the receptionist or something like that. So it would always be, you know, if the receptionist logs a ticket with us, make sure that you speak to Joe or Bob or whoever, you know, whoever their boss is to make sure that they're actually allowed to log a ticket with you because maybe you've got some kind of agreement that only senior people can log tickets or whatever the case might be.

So, you know, it's a really good way to just keep general notes about the customer that alerts somebody when something needs to be flagged up with that customer. So, you know, I really I like the use of using alerts and like I said, I don't really use the CRM as much as I should and I really, really should use it a lot more. And part of the reason to be fair in my defense is, you know, as a consultant, it's just me on my own. So, you know, a lot of the stuff I don't need to have to do is for everyone else to do. And I use my calendar more in Outlook to remind me to speak to a customer.

But, you know, I think after this conversation, you know, I really should be using it a lot more seeing as I'm telling everyone else to use it. And I know that I started the conversation in the CRM, but I want to go back to the alerts for a minute because sometimes our clients, our customers confide in us when they are having internal staffing problems and they may want to change passwords, administrative passwords or, you know, start to lock out somebody, a particular member of their company that they're having staffing issues with. So, you might want to use those alerts to say, hey, don't give Mary Jones, you know, these passwords or be very careful with the information that you share with, you know, Bob Smith because the owner of the company doesn't want this person, you know, to have all of the keys to the kingdom any longer, even though they may have already had it. You know, so you can use alerts for any purpose of, you know, whether it's an internal billing problem or, you know, a special soft touch customer problem, you know, your customer is complaining about this, that or the other thing and you know that it's a hot button for them, stick it on an alert. Anybody that opens up a ticket or sees a ticket will know exactly what that hot button is and know not to push it for that customer.

There's so many different opportunities to use alerts to communicate effectively inside your MSP. Absolutely. I really like that, Brianne. I think that's actually a really, really good use of the alerts and I think it's a, you know, a great way to get your staff internally to know what's going on at the customer. Like you say, if it's any, you know, don't give a password to this particular person, but also, you know, yeah, don't speak to this customer because they haven't paid their bills, whatever the case might be, or, you know, it could even be something like what you might want to change on a daily basis, even saying, you know, I just had a conversation with Frank and he's having a bad day because his dog died or his cat died or whatever, so, you know, go easy on him and that kind of stuff.

And so I think it's a really good way to kind of communicate or to get a message across to the guys within your team as to how they should handle the customer or the kinds of things that they can and can't say to those customers. So I really like that. But while we're on this topic, I wanted to ask you about the plug-in to Outlook and, you know, to see whether that's something you guys actually use within your business as well. As a matter of fact, we do not. And every time I look at it, I ask myself, why aren't I using this?

So tell me how you're using the plug-in. So we actually use it quite extensively. So, you know, every time I do speak to a customer, I know I said I don't keep the stuff, I don't use alerts and all that kind of stuff as much as I can. But from time to time, if there's a, you know, if a customer sends me or a prospect sends me a request about, you know, doing some business with them, I'll actually take that email and I'll use the email plug-in to actually take that email correspondence and push that in against the opportunity so that now I've got the opportunity and I've got that information at hand to be able to see what was discussed about that opportunity. So again, really good use of using that.

The same way is from time to time, you know, and I think a lot of people out there who know me will know that I, like yourself, I have a few clients that I still do some IT work for as a, although I'm not an MSP, I just have one or two clients just to kind of keep my hand in. And sometimes from time to time, those customers will send an email to me directly wanting a ticket created or, you know, they're having some kind of issue and they'll send it to me directly and I'll use that plug-in into Outlook to actually create the ticket from there as well. So once you get that email in Outlook, then how do you get that into, what does this plug-in do? What buttons do you push? Is there something on the toolbar in Outlook that says send this to Autotask?

How does that work? Yeah, absolutely. So once you've put the, once you've installed the plug-in, there's exactly that. It puts a toolbar at the top of Outlook. On the main screen of Outlook, you'll see a little Autotask logo.

And if you click on there, it'll say, you know, create ticket from email, create note from email or update ticket note from email, that kind of stuff. So you have the ability to take that email and just push it straight up into Autotask directly. But the other thing you can do is when you actually send the email, so from the send screen, you know, you type up your email as per normal, but instead of clicking the send button on the left-hand side, right on the very right-hand side of the toolbar, there's a button that says send to Autotask. And what that will actually do is it'll send the email to the customer as per normal, as a normal email, but it'll also upload it against the customer CRM record in Autotask. So what it does is looks at the domain name and says, okay, well, I know what the domain name is for this customer.

So, you know, if it's Chris, it's on Dell Consulting, what it then says is, okay, I know who this guy is. I'm going to just put it against that record within the CRM. If it doesn't know who it is, it pops up a box and asks you to type in the name of who the customer is that it should go to, and it just puts it up against them on the CRM. So, you know, so a great tool, you know, we use it quite extensively. And actually one of the nice things is a lot of people may not know this, but Autotask has actually recently just changed, I think in the last release that came out back end of last year.

What it used to do is when you clicked on, you know, add to Autotask, it would actually bring up Internet Explorer. They've now changed it so you can now tell it to the screen that pops up for you to enter the stuff into Autotask is whatever your default browser is set to. So that if that's Chrome or Firefox or whatever, you bring up that browser rather than Internet Explorer. Yes, they are finally starting to move away from Internet Explorer. So even the QuickBooks desktop is coming out with an updated integration that will move away from Internet Explorer finally.

Thank goodness. Absolutely. Yeah, I think I think finally they've realized that not many people use Internet Explorer and people are using all sorts of other stuff like, you know, Chrome or Firefox or even Edge. And actually, just a bit of an aside, I don't know if anyone's used it or whether you have, but the new Edge is really, really nice. It's actually based on Chromium.

So it's almost as if you're using Chrome by using the new Microsoft Edge. So, you know, I use that now as my go-to browser as the default browser I use for everything. And that works really well with Autotask in general, but also works really well with the plugin into Outlook as well. No kidding. I knew that Microsoft was pushing out Chromium and I have not yet seen it.

So it's interesting to hear that it's now your new go-to. So I'm looking forward to looking at it. Yeah, I'm a Chrome and Firefox diehard, but I would be interested in hearing from any of our listeners out there. You know, how are you using the CRM or the alerts features inside your PSA? And so reach out to us on psaimpact.net or on the Facebook group for PSA Impact or even the Autotask Facebook group.

We'll be sure to see your messages there. Absolutely. All right. And that was a great topic, a great thing for us to talk about as always, Ray. And so all that's left for me to say now is your PSA is the key to your MSP success.

Go out and make an impact on your world today. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners. Bye.