[13] – Speed Codes and Widgets

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP with your hosts, Rayanne 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 podcast with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. We are an independent PSA series designed to help MSPs worldwide on all things PSA.

You can get your questions answered by Rayanne and myself and learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP. We have a phone in where folks can call us up with their questions or problems, and we will attempt to answer them. You can also get in touch with us on all the socials, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and we'll put all of the links to these in the show notes. So with me today is Rayanne. How are you doing, Rayanne?

I'm doing great today, Chris. How are you? I'm good, thank you. So, Rayanne, what have we got on the agenda for today? Well, we've got a couple of open questions from the Facebook groups that I thought maybe we could chat about.

The first one is a simple question. What is everyone doing for time entries that techs need to enter when they make a call to a customer and have to leave a voicemail? So the tech calls, leaves a voicemail, enters that information into the ticket so it's times tracked. In some cases, this might cause a small billable fee. But what is the best practice, and what are some MSPs out there doing?

Oh, that's my favorite topic again. You know, I love answering all these kind of questions. Yeah, with regards to that, I mean, what I would do, and the way I certainly do this with all my clients, and I do it myself as well, is on the ticket time entry screen, I would put a speed code or form template. And simply that is just, I actually have one that just says left voicemail. And when you click on that, what it simply does is it goes in and it automatically changes the work type if you wanted to do that.

But in the summary notes, then just says, dear Mr. Customer, tried to call you, left a message. You weren't there. Please call me back. And it automatically logs five minutes of time as well.

So what this thing does is it timestamps the fact that I spent five minutes on the call leaving the message. And that then can either be billed to the customer as a billable time entry, or can just flow through to the contract and get taken as part of the contract. So how do you do these kind of things, Raeanne? So just for clarification, you're talking about a speed code for the time entry, not the ticket itself, right? So let's assume that there was a ticket already opened, and the tech just needs to call to follow up with the customer for this reason or that, gets a voicemail, leaves a voicemail, and just needs to acknowledge that he did work on this ticket.

If only for five minutes to make a phone call, right? Absolutely. So exactly. So it's a time entry speed code. And so you can customize these speed codes for the ticket itself, as well as for the time entry.

So this is specifically for a time entry. So the tech would go in, enter his time as per normal. So it would bring up that time entry screen. And then would click at the top right hand corner, say left message. That will then change the status for you of that time entry.

It'll change the work type if you wanted to. It'll also log how many hours or minutes, in this case, that you've worked, and also add the summary notes to it. What you can then do is, based off the back of that, of course, on that time entry, you can then trigger that to send an email to the customer. So what I do is have everything ticked so that, for the ticket contact, for example, is ticked. So all you need to do is literally click on the enter time, select that speed code, save and close, job done, you're good to go.

It sends an email to the customer saying, try to call you, you weren't there, we've left a message, blah, blah, blah, really easy. So this person asking the question says that it often creates a small billable fee. And I suppose that would happen if it's a time and materials contract or not associated with any contract at all, like a recurring service contract. Because if it was a recurring service contract, it would show up as time spent but not billable to the customer. So the question goes on to say, I don't really want to charge for these things, but how can I stop from removing the time or the dollars from this ticket entry?

I think the simple answer to that question, of course, is make a non-billable work code for them to use when they are returning calls, which, of course, could be put into that speed code that you're talking about. Absolutely, yeah, that's exactly the way I would do it as a non-billable, is to just say, have that non-billable work type. At that point, you just won't send an invoice or that line item on the invoice to the customer. Of course, if you're using a recurring service contract, it's a midpoint anyway, because that just zeroes it out and adds it as part of the contract. But for those people who might be doing break-fix and you don't want to bill the customer for that, just use a non-billable work type, and you're good to go.

I think we can probably both agree on the fact that we definitely want the tech to enter time for those calls. Because at the end of the contract period, when you are running your profitability reports, you want to know exactly how much time your techs are spending on this particular customer, whether it's a successful communication with that customer or not. Otherwise, how will you know exactly how much time is being spent for that customer, chasing them down, trying to answer a question that they asked? Your thoughts? Absolutely.

I mean, I fully agree with that. I think it's really important to log that time, not just from a point of view, as you said, to how do you track the time at the end of the year. But it might be that maybe that customer is, that's always happening, right? Is they're logging tickets with you, and then every time your tech phone's back, they're always getting voicemail, or the customer's just never there. That could be a great opportunity for you to go and talk to your customer and say, every time we phone you back, it's five minutes of our engineer's time trying to get hold of you, and you never respond, or you never come back, or you're always on voicemail, that kind of thing.

And we then have the proof that we've done that, and we can show how long we've actually spent on that over the course of whatever period of time we want to report on that. That's an interesting point. It probably would also indicate a communication problem between you and your customer that could be used to increase customer service with that customer in advance of a problem starting because of a lack of communication between the two companies. Interesting. Absolutely.

So yeah, so I think the answer on that is definitely you should have a speed code or form template, as they're called now, on the time entry to do that, and just have a non-billable work type. Unless you're using a recurring service contract, then it doesn't actually matter. And just record that time and make sure that your engineers are using that for every time they're leaving a message and can't get hold of the customer. So that was a really good question. I think it's a really good way to look at this.

And something that's actually quite underutilized and underused in the system is speed codes, especially on time entries. So I've been working with a lot of customers recently setting up speed codes or form templates for tickets, time entries, quotes, opportunities. You can set up a form template for just about anything now. But if it's OK, I think we probably have enough time for another question because I do have a second question. And this is a pretty good segue right into it.

So you have some more time, Chris? Absolutely. Yeah, carry on. All right, let's do it. So the next question that came in was, what are some best practices regarding noticing customer-supplied responses to open tickets?

So let me give you an example. Is there a way to have unacknowledged ticket responses appear on the dashboard and remain there until it's acknowledged? We would prefer to be able to see updates on tickets within Autotask and avoid using email notifications for each response or note added. Rayanne, you've got to stop doing this to me. You've got to stop asking me questions.

Wait, let me guess. Your favorite topic. My favorite topic, you've got to stop doing this to me. Yeah, I mean, again, this is a great question. And actually, very, very simple answer to it, really, is you can basically just have a status on the ticket that says waiting customer and have a widget that can show all tickets in that status.

And then when the customer has responded from the incoming email processing, you can just set to say when a customer responds, change it to this status. So when the customer responds, it can just say customer responded, and that can be another widget that can show customer responded. So now you have two widgets, one showing all tickets where you've changed it to waiting customer. So this is everything I'm waiting for my customer to do. And then I have another one that says customer responded.

So I can very quickly have a look and see where the customer's responded to it. You don't need to have any emails for that. Don't need any workflow rules. It's just pretty much built in into the incoming email processing. Just change the status, and you're good to go.

And you can just have a widget to show that information. So interesting, because as you were talking, I was thinking, oh, you must mean a workflow rule so that when the customer responds and it comes in, then the workflow rule would automatically update the status, but you're saying that that would happen in the customer portal automatically, but when the customer responds in, the status would change, yes? Not the customer portal. So it's the built-in incoming email processing. So there's actually a couple of options on there.

There's a few tabs along the top. One of them talks about what happens when the email is first received. And then the other one is ticket note. So it says when the ticket note is updated. So in other words, when a customer responds to that email and updates the ticket, it automatically updates it.

And at that point, you can change the status. So you don't even need a workflow rule for it. It's built into that incoming email processing. So there's a few tabs along the top. You'll see the first one says ticket, and then the next one along says ticket note.

And as long as you activate that, and then that will send a note. What you can do is have an email off the back end of that that will basically go back to the customer to say, hey, Mr. Customer, we've got your response, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time, all it's doing is updating the ticket status to customer responded or whatever you want to put on there. Then you build two small widgets on the service desk dashboard showing how many tickets are open and waiting on a customer's response.

And a second widget that shows how many customers have responded or how many tickets are open that had customers respond that are now waiting for a tech to re-pick it up. Yep. For lack of a better word. Yeah, I have two widgets on my desktop that basically does exactly that. So the one widget just shows all tickets that are currently open that are waiting customer.

So that means the customer hasn't responded. I'm waiting for them to come back to me. When they respond on the email, it automatically changes the status to customer note added. It then moves out of the widget that was waiting for the customer and it jumps into the next widget, which says customer note added. So my techs can now go and have a look at that widget that can say, this is everything that the customer's responded to.

Here's all the emails. Really, really simple, very straightforward. Interesting. What a great idea. I don't know why I hadn't thought of this before, but I could use that in so many different ways.

You know, I'm sitting here as you're talking and I'm thinking of all of the different ways that I could like create an RB zone, right? So when tickets come in and they go into the RB zone, my zone, and sometimes, you know, they get lost or buried in the big long list of things that I have to do on any given day, but I could create that little widget that would just be right in front of my face all the time, telling me how many tickets are waiting on me. Absolutely. And I mean, you could just have a status called RB zone and say, you know, these are all the tickets sitting in RB zone. Just have a widget that looks at that status.

It's really simple. I mean, in fact, it's the simplest widget in the world to create. Just create a widget to show all tickets, filter it by status equal to whatever, you know, RB zone in your case, you know, and you're good to go. And it'll show you all tickets in that status. So I have, what I do with my audit task, I have a bunch of widgets that kind of almost flow through, you know, so I look at the stuff that I really need to action every day, you know, that's sitting in one widget to be actioned.

And then, you know, I have another one that says, okay, these are all the tickets I've responded to or as waiting customer or doing whatever goes to the next widget and so on and so on. So you can just kind of flow it almost through, you know, a whole bunch of widgets on your dashboard so that you know, you know, once you've responded, it goes out of the one into the other and so on and so on. And it kind of almost looks like it's flowing through the system, through all of these different widgets that are getting updated based on the status, based on the, you know, whatever information you want on the ticket. So yeah, so really straightforward, very easy answer to that question. Very cool.

So that's really all I have for today. Do you have anything else you wanted to add, Chris? No, I think that was a great session today. And all that's really left for me to say, Ryan, is your PSA is the key to your MSP success. So 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.