[10] – Automation Tips

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 with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. How are you doing, Rayanne?

I'm doing great, Chris. How are you today? Good, thank you. This is our first recording of 2020, so hopefully this is the first of many. So Rayanne, what topics do you have for us to talk about today?

Well, on the PSA Impact Facebook page, we had a question from Jason in Utah, and he is interested in hearing about some automation features. What sort of things do other MSPs use to automate inside their MSP using their PSA? Oh, you know, Rayanne, I keep saying this, and honestly, it's one of my favorite topics because I just love the way in which a PSA tool, especially Autotask, allows you to automate a lot of processes in your business. So great topic for us to talk about, and if you'd like, I can kick off on this. I think one of the things that I see a lot of from an automations point of view is, like we spoke about, workflow rules, right?

So being able to automate what happens with a ticket, for example, so when a ticket comes into Autotask, we can actually go through and look at some keywords that might be in the email, so things like server, maybe if it contains the word server, it automatically can flow through to the second line support team, and then can actually have an email being triggered based on that straight to the customer saying, you know, we've got your issue, it's now been assigned a high priority, all of those kind of things. So certainly from a workflow rule perspective, there's some really, really good things we can do. So what about you, Rae-Ann? Well, I just want to touch on that workflow rule, because we also use workflow rules, too. But what we do is we might use those workflow rules to pass a ticket around the office.

So when a ticket comes in, and if it starts off at, let's say, a level one ticket, and it goes into the level one queue, and then what we do is we'll change the status to escalated. And then the workflow rule will pick it up and automatically move it to the second tier queue in the service desk, so that those that are in the second tier queue will now see that ticket, and it will land in their triage so that they can pick it up. So that's another way to use workflow rules. But another favorite automation tool that I like is scheduling live reports. So if you ever use a live reports designer, say like in Autotask, and I'm certain that all of the other PSAs have a report designer or a report scheduler, one of my favorites is the contract expiration.

I want to know 60 days in advance when a contract is coming up for renewal. That gives me plenty of time to review the contract, reach out to the customer, and get the contract renewed. We also use live reports to send inventory reports directly out of Autotask on the last first day of the month to accounting, so that accounting can then update their inventory records. Are there some that you like to use? Yeah, I mean, I love what you're saying about live reports, and I definitely think that's a topic we can talk about in huge detail.

We can probably do like 10 episodes just on live reports, because there's so much to talk about on them. It's such an underutilized part of Autotask, but I fully agree. I think being able to automate those live reports and send them to your customers, like you say, for things like warranty expirations, things like stock control reports, those kinds of things. One of the really nice things about what you just mentioned about live reports is when it comes to warranty expiration, there's so many ways you can actually do that in Autotask. Not only can you use the live reports and schedule that out to go to somebody to automate that process, but you can also do it from a widget on a dashboard.

As well as that, there's actually a workflow rule now built in for that as well. It gives you the ability to workflow on it, to say, if the warranty is expiring within X amount of days, then ping an email to somebody. You actually, for that particular instance, you actually don't need to even have a live report anymore because you can just simply either do it as a widget or you can just workflow directly on that and send an email to somebody with a customized HTML email. So there's some really, really cool stuff you can do. But one of the things I do like talking about live reports is the ability to actually change those filters based on who you're sending it to.

So when you're running the report, you can actually change the filters to say, send this account manager only the information about his accounts or the warranties are expiring only for his account. So at kind of run time or when it gets scheduled, you can automatically change that section of the live reports to be able to actually filter it down to specific account managers and send a different report to each account manager, but only design the report once. So there are so many cool things you can do as far as live reporting is concerned. Just before we get off the topic of live reports, I'd like to throw it out there to our listeners because I agree we could probably do an entire podcast episode just on live reports. So if there are some things that you would like to learn or maybe a report that you would like to design, come see us at PSAimpact.net, leave us a message and we will, you know, maybe we will pick up your live report for one of our demonstrations in a future episode.

Absolutely. I fully agree. I think there's so much we can do around that. And just getting back to the workflow rules, you know, we were talking about that. So I've been actually working with a client that had some really, really cool things they were doing on a workflow rule.

So they're not strictly an MSP, they're a company that does other things. You know, I can say what they do. They're basically a radio company. So they sell kind of CB type radio, you know, walkie talkies, whatever you want to call them. So they're strictly not even an MSP.

And what they were doing is when people are sending radios in for repairs, they were logging all of that on a ticket with user defined fields on the ticket based on a particular ticket category. And then what they were doing is workflowing by saying, if we change the status to say radio received, it looked at those user defined fields and actually put those into the email to send to the customer to say, hey, Mr. Customer, just to let you know, we've received your radio back and these are all the parts you sent with us. Because when the radio came in, the guy would log in those user defined fields, what parts he's received back as part with that radio. And then it would send that email out to the customer based on what was inside that user defined field.

So it's so, so powerful in terms of being able to automate pretty much anything as far as tickets are concerned. The same thing with opportunities, actually exactly the same thing they do. And it's something that I absolutely love. And we are trying to do this with all of my clients is when they create an opportunity, there's a whole bunch of pre-qualifying questions that they ask, which get filled in to user defined fields as well. And then what happens is once they save that opportunity, it then sends an email to the customer saying, hey, here's all the requirements you told us about.

These are all of the things that we actually have understood about your requirements. And thank you for contacting us. We'll be back in touch with you shortly. And that is such a great way of being able to communicate with your customers to say, hey, you're on the phone with us. We understood your requirements.

We filled all of these in a whole bunch of user defined fields on an opportunity and we automatically pinged an email to you. So your sales guy doesn't have to go back later on and say, hey, Mr. Customer, I'm sending this email and what did the customer say and blah, blah, blah, because he's filling those UDFs on the opportunity whilst the customer is on the phone. And then he clicks save and close and off it goes. And it's such a great way to automate things like that to let your customers know that you firstly understood their requirement, but secondly, not having to then double work and actually go and re-email the customer later on.

So such a great way of being able to automate a lot of stuff using workflow rules. Very cool. That is a lot of really great information. And, you know, I've often wondered how people use UDFs in their MSP, because I've seen that question come up a few times, too. So I think that was really great information on how you can use the UDFs and then incorporate it into customer correspondence right out of Autotest through the ticket.

So that's awesome. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's, you know, I think it's something that a lot of people don't actually realize you can do is that you can automate on all of those workflow rules. So not only can you trigger on one of those. So, you know, if you've got a drop down list and it's a yes, no, you can trigger on that.

Yes, no. But you can also add those fields just into the body of the email that you send to your customer. So it just allows you to to have a huge amount of automation for pretty much anything that you do for your customers. So any fields or any information you capture and you want to tell your customers about that, you can absolutely do that through workflow rules. So really, really powerful way of being able to automate things.

So what's your next automation tip? So the next one I think is, you know, we spoke about this just offline about contract exclusions, you know, being able to kind of, you know, automatically exclude certain, you know, work types and certain roles from contracts. So, you know, if a contract, you know, doesn't include, say, on-site support, then you can automatically exclude that as part of a contract. So when they're picking on-site support, the contract automatically knows whether it's going to bill for that work or whether it's going to be included or not. So technically, that could be looked at as, you know, automation in terms of the fact that nobody has to remember that that actually has to be done.

The system does all of that for you. I'm always surprised at how many people don't know about contract exclusions or how they work. One of the recurring issues that people will come to me with is we find that we have to go through and very carefully choose which contract the ticket is in. The concept of the exclusion really takes the guesswork out of the technician's hands. Right.

The ticket is created and the work type is chosen, the role is chosen, you know, and it's sent out to that to that employee. Or if the technician actually creates the ticket himself, you know, a couple of ways that you could do that is using the speed codes or the ticket categories to limit their choices, you know, on specific types of tasks. And then when coupled with the contract exclusions, then you pick up that on site support. And this particular recurring service contract does not include on site support. And if you have that exclusion in there, it will point to the next contract in line, typically a time and materials contract so that Autotask will know to bill it.

And that's the other thing I think about contracts, too. And we could probably talk about contracts all day, but so many people skip the time and materials contract creation entirely and say, oh, that's fine. I don't need a contract. If it's just time and materials, Autotask will bill it. But the point of the time and materials contract is that you can set the rates.

So you may have a special rate for special customers. Maybe your nonprofits get charged a lower rate than your for profit companies. Those sorts of things, you can really automate a lot of that, too, without having to rely on the approved and posting person to change those at the billing rate. Absolutely. No, I fully agree.

And I mean, that's a great way to automate things, right, is to, you know, as you say, take the guesswork out of your engineers hands and and they just all they're doing is picking a work type and Autotask is determining whether that bit of work is going to be billed for or not. So the way I used to do it when I ran an MSP business is, you know, we would have remote and telephone support all included in our contracts, but any on site support we actually used to charge as part of a block. So we would sell the customer 10 hours or 20 hours, whatever they wanted as a block, and that would cover the on site support. So what we would then have is a is a work type that said if our engineers pick this work type, it would automatically exclude it from the contract and automatically deducted out of their blocks. So, you know, my engineers didn't even have to know that.

They just picked that work type. The contract would do what it's supposed to do in the back end. It would go through to billing and we just bill either as part of a contract or bill, you know, off their blocks. And the great thing about that automation side is it just flows into billing automatically. So you don't even have to worry about it or or make sure it's right.

I mean, you've got the approved and post process to go and check that things are correct, but it just flows through into there and you can just go bill for it and you're good to go. So, you know, really, really good, a good way of doing some automation. One of the other things just coming back to contracts, we were talking about block hours. You know, there's actually a block hours report that I think a lot of people don't know is the kind of report that will tell you when you've reached a particular threshold. So if you're selling, say, 10 hours a month or 20 hours a month, whatever the case might be, you can have a report automatically be sent out to the customer when they hit a particular threshold.

So maybe they're getting down to five hours a month, automatically send a report out to them. So we work with a lot of our customers on block hour contracts at my consulting firm. And what we do is exactly that. So, you know, we'll sell a block of 10 hours and we'll say when you get down to three hours, we'll automatically send you a report just saying, hey, you're down to three hours. What do you want to do?

Do you want to buy some more? If you want to buy some more, great. If not, that's OK, but you're down to three. And so, you know, we're going to end that soon, whatever. So really, really good way.

But the other thing you can do at the same time as that is if you have, you know, maybe a process with your customers that you say as part of our contract, we'll auto top up. So we'll just automatically top up another five hours. That little workflow rule that's kind of built into the block hour contracts allows you to do that as well. So it warns you when you get to a threshold and does an auto top up and sends it into billing as well. So that's a great automation tip that you can use if you're using auto task and block hours.

Absolutely. I use the same thing. It's in the notifications tab, I think, inside the block hour contract. Indeed. Yeah.

So, you know, and it's it's such a simple thing to set up. And I think it's literally, you know, a click of a box, say what the threshold is and, you know, select which report goes out or which notification goes. That's not really a report. It's more kind of a notification on an email and away you go. So.

So, yeah, I think there's some some really good kind of automation tips there. Do you have any others that you wanted to talk about? I think we touched on everything that was on my list. I would love to hear from others if they have automation tips that they'd like to share with us. They could find our website at PSA Impact dot net or go to our Facebook page for PSA Impact and leave us a message.

I would love that. Absolutely. Yeah, I think it would be great. I mean, you know, and just following on from that, this is really something, you know, we want our listeners to to get some benefits out of these these podcasts that we're doing. So if there's a particular topic you want us to talk about, you know, reach us through, you know, as Ryan said, through our Facebook page on our website.

There is a link there that you can email us or you can actually leave us a voice note or voice message. So there's a number of ways to get hold of us. And we would more than happy to talk about any of the topics that you want us to discuss in more detail. So this was a really great, great topic today, Ryan. And, you know, as always, one of my favorite topics.

So all that's really left for me to say 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.