[1] PSAImpact- Episode 1

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts, Rayanne Buccianico and Chris Timm. 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. Okay, hello everybody and welcome to the very first PSA Impact podcast. We're a monthly PSA independent series with a corresponding YouTube channel and we're here to help MSPs worldwide on all things PSA.

With me today I have my co-presenter, Rayanne, and in a few minutes I'll let her introduce herself. The purpose of the series is 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 business. We'll have a facility on our website where folks can call up, leave their questions and problems and we will attempt to answer them. You can also get in touch with us via our Facebook group and Twitter and we'll put some links to these in the show notes. So hello Rayanne, would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners?

Hi everybody, my name is Rayanne Buccianico. Please call me Rayanne, it makes life a lot easier for all of us. I am the owner of ABC Solutions. I'm in the Clearwater, Florida area of the United States and we are an accounting firm that specializes in working with IT firms and MSPs all around the U.S. and Canada as well as a small MSP in the Clearwater, Florida, Tampa Bay area and that is why I am here. Now Chris, tell us about you and why you are here.

Hey Rayanne, thanks for that. Yeah, so my name is Chris Timm. I run a company called Sondella Consulting in the UK and we specialize in helping MSPs get the best out of their PSA tools. I ran an MSP business for eight years and I sold that business back in 2012. At the time I sold the business, I was approached by Watertask in the UK to head up their pre and post sales teams and I went on to work with them for five years.

Now in my business, I specialize in helping MSPs to get the best from their PSA and RMM tools. So just in case anybody was wondering what Sondella actually means, being a South African, I chose a Zulu word, which is a Zulu for those who don't know is a South African tribe. I mean Zulu really, well the Zulu word for Sondella is move forward or advance and this is really why we started the company because that's exactly what we do is we help MSPs to move forward in their business or to advance in their business. So I'm going to pass back over to you, Raeanne. Chris, after listening to your bio, it's obvious that you and I have a lot of similarities and synergies and so I thought that we would tell everybody here how we got here and why we decided to start.

So my recollection is I saw you posting on a Facebook group answering a PSA question and you and I have known each other for a number of years and I just kind of reached out and said, why aren't we doing something to help educate the MSPs on their PSAs? Was that your recollection? Absolutely, Raeanne. I think that's exactly how it happened and as you and I know, there's a lot of groups out there that people can go to and there's a lot of Facebook groups, there's a lot of IT specific groups where people are asking PSA questions. And I think also from our point of view, you and I in our own businesses, we get a lot of questions from a lot of MSPs.

But when you and I had a talk about this, about why to start a PSA podcast, we realized that there's a lot of people who want to ask specific questions and who want specific questions answered and we thought this would be a great platform for us to actually do this on and a great way for us to impart our knowledge onto people and also hopefully for people to ask questions and learn from each other and learn from us. So, you know, hopefully we're going to be able to do that through this podcast series. I hope so too. I would like to offer a platform, I think, where we can educate people that may not have had the proper education. You know, you buy the PSA tool, it gets implemented, you're running your business the whole time and people are busy and it's difficult to carve out that time to watch videos and read the knowledge-based articles and all of that.

Sometimes you just have a simple problem or a single problem and you need a single answer to that problem and that's what I'm hoping to accomplish. Absolutely. And the great thing about this, Rayanne, is we actually, you're based in the US, I'm based in the UK, so a lot of people might be thinking, how can they actually get hold of us? So what we've actually got on our website, which I mentioned earlier on, is we have the ability and the facility for somebody to go on and leave a question. So by all means, go ahead and do that.

Leave us a question and Rayanne and I will pick one of those questions each time that we do the podcast and we'll look to address that in the best way that we can. So we really, really encourage everyone to go on there to start asking those questions and also, you know, come onto our Facebook group, onto Twitter, ask those questions. And, you know, and if we hear of anything in our businesses as we're working with MSPs, then obviously we will, you know, we'll find questions that people might find useful and how we answer those with our MSPs. And so we can absolutely just make sure that we get those answered in every session that we do. Of course, if anyone wants to remain anonymous on this, then by all means, we're happy to do that.

But if you'd like us to mention your name, then just let us know and we will absolutely do that as well. So speaking of which, I actually had my first question and this one came from Adam in Canada. And I don't really know where in Canada Adam is, but he approached me and said he was looking for some training for his organization. And his exact wording was, our techs have lots of tasks, but seem to not know what to work on. And I thought, wow, what a perfect topic to start our podcast.

Because, well, Chris, what's your take on this problem? Well, actually, you know, that's one of my favorite questions. I love it when people ask those sorts of questions. And I hear this so many times. I hear it pretty much in every call that I do with customers.

They're always asking about ticket prioritization, you know, how they can organize those tickets, what's the best way to do that. And I always say, you know, to me, let's keep it simple, very straightforward. Have only a few number of queues. And what I would typically say on this is to go ahead and have, for example, a triage queue and then have some automation in the back end of that where everything that comes into that queue or that board, you know, whichever flavor of PSA tool you're using, have some automation on that that then automatically determines where that ticket actually goes to and who that, you know, which engineer that goes to, which department that goes to, whether that's first line support, second line support, whatever the case might be, and have it automated as much as you possibly can. And then what you can do is any of the other tickets that are missed by that for whatever reason, you know, they're not able to be automated, then have somebody once a day, once an hour, whatever it is, you know, in your business, have somebody go in and manually then just assign where those tickets go to.

You know, one of the great things with a lot of the PSA tools is, you know, you can automate it based on words that come in on the email. So if somebody's saying, you know, server down, you might want to automatically send that to your first or your second line queue or your first or second line team. So, you know, a lot of the PSA tools allow you to do that. And just, I know this is quite a long-winded answer, Rae-Ann, but very, very simple to me, I would say, you know, just have one queue called a triage and then maybe have another queue called first and second line support and then have a separate queue for your RMM alerts. And then you've really only got four or five queues and it's easy to manage and it's easy then to automate where those tickets go to.

So is that kind of how you think it or have you got a different approach on that, Rae-Ann? I have to preface my answer by saying that we did not discuss this question before we got here. But literally, I do the exact same thing. Set up the triage queue and then start working tickets first in, first out, or by priority. So like you say, if it comes in with saying server down, then that should automatically get a red flag and have a workflow rule set up to send it to the proper section or the proper technicians to handle that.

The regular general queue tickets that come in, you know, they land in the triage queue and they should be worked first in order of priority and then as you're working down first in, first out. So, you know, if three critical tickets come in, the first critical ticket gets worked on first and then the next tech comes in and picks up the next one. They grab it out of the queue, they put it into their workspace and start to work on it immediately. We always want to make sure that we take care of the SLAs. So if it's a high-priority client that has a two-hour SLA versus, you know, a lower-priority client that has a four-hour SLA, you know, so you need to prioritize those as well.

Absolutely. And Rae-Anne, just going on what you just said about first in gets prioritized first, for example. So how do you determine what, you know, if I'm an engineer and I'm sitting there and I'm seeing tickets that come in, how do I know which one is coming first? Sort of by date and time. Yeah.

Okay. No, I was just checking to see, you know, just from an engineer's perspective, right, is to say, you know, as an engineer, how would I know which one's coming first? And I get asked that question so many times and it is really just something as simple as have the columns in your queues to show you which tickets have come in, what times they've come in and just prioritize them based on that. Right. The service coordinator, I think, is also very important here because the service coordinator should be the person reviewing that triage queue to determine whether this particular ticket came from a client.

And oh, by the way, this is Bob's client. I need to get this over to Bob. You know, it doesn't belong in triage if it really belongs to a specific technician. So the service coordinator needs to understand his or her job when delegating those tickets as they come in. And then the ones that remain, all of these tickets should be cleared out every day or at least touched before the end of the day.

Absolutely. And, you know, you were talking about that service coordinator role and, you know, one of the things with automation, you can actually, you know, have it automated in such a way that the service coordinator doesn't need to know that that ticket necessarily needs to go to Bob because, you know, based on the customer, based on maybe the location, whatever the case might be, you know, the workflow rules in the background can automatically determine that, you know, those kinds of tickets for that customer always go to Bob or maybe, you know, only tickets that are server related for that particular customer is going to go to Bob. So, you know, that'll actually make your service coordinator's job a lot easier and a lot simpler because they're not having to think, oh, you know, is this a Bob ticket or is this a, you know, a Frank ticket, whatever the case might be. They're just going to know that the automation is pretty much going to take care of the majority of that and whatever's left, they're going to say, okay, you know, we have a bunch of tickets left and then at that point, they can make the decision as to where those go. So that's really great information, Chris.

You know, and I'm sure that there's other topics or other issues that MSPs might encounter where ticket priority is not set up correctly or maybe they have workflow rules and they're not working properly or they're not firing correctly, you know, so I'm sure that there's other reasons out there why ticket priority is a hot topic for some of these MSPs and perhaps even we can have another complete topic on workflow rules, you know, and different types of workflow rules that could be set up and how to set them up in a typical MSP. So I'm hoping that we've answered Adam's question about ticket priority and maybe even left him with a few tips and actionable items that he can take back to his techs to try to prioritize the work inside that MSP because if you have a service desk that is just not working to full capacity, then you're probably leaving dollars on the table. So let's get that service desk running like a smooth machine and, you know, and prioritize those tickets. Yeah, great topic, I think, Rae-Ann, and I'm sure this has got a lot more legs. I'm sure we can go a lot further with this and actually, here's a call out to Adam.

You know who you are, so, you know, why don't you reach out to us and let us know if this has actually helped you solve your problem. So, you know, hopefully we've given you enough information to at least be able to put some changes into place and, you know, hopefully you'll reach out to us in some way via one of the forums and give us some feedback as to whether that's actually been of any use to your business. Okay, so actually here's a shout out to MSPs and a challenge for MSPs. If anyone has any different way of doing this or anybody wants to be able to, you know, answer Adam's question differently, then, you know, why don't you reach out to us on the forum? So, you know, as we've mentioned throughout this podcast, you can get hold of us on our Facebook group, on Twitter, you can visit our website, which is psaimpact.net, and you can leave us a message on the website.

So maybe you have some ways that you want to help, you know, Adam and others like him to let him know how you're actually prioritising your tickets and how you're organising those. You know, let's try and make this as interactive as possible. I would rather MSPs and, you know, understand the way that they use ticket priorities because I find that I learn so much from every MSP that I meet. I don't know it all, you don't know it all, and we're all out here trying to help each other. So I look forward to hearing all of that feedback.

Okay, so thank you for that, Rae-Ann, and what we'd invite everyone to do is to give us some feedback. I mean, this is our first attempt at podcast, you know, as we go by, we're hoping that, you know, we're going to have some more things to talk about. But, you know, like we've said all the way throughout, you know, there's many ways you can get hold of us, ask us your questions, give us some feedback on what you think of this podcast today. And if you think there's anything we can change, anything we can do differently, we can do We're really looking to you guys to help us with this. We want to make this a podcast that you guys can learn from and that becomes an integral part of your business.

So, you know, your PSA is the key to your MSP success. And go out and make an impact 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.