Transform your service delivery operations with these 8 ServiceDesk Plus MSP automations

As an MSP, your daily operations are filled with a variety of tasks that need to be executed efficiently to ensure customer satisfaction. With the increasing complexity of IT infrastructures and the constant need for rapid support, manual intervention may no longer be sufficient to meet the demands of your clients. IT technicians devote an estimated 39% of their time to manual tasks, and 88% say these tasks prevent engineers from spending time on innovation or advancing strategic goals, according to an IT industry survey commissioned by LogicMonitor. In such a scenario, automation can be the key to revolutionizing your operations and taking your MSP operations to the next level.

In this article, we will explore eight automation features of ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus MSP that can help you achieve operational excellence and elevate your MSP to new heights.

Obstacles confronted by MSPs due to lack
of automation

Lack of automation impacts the productivity of technicians and, therefore, the overall profitability of the business at the end of the day. While there are a lot of challenges MSPs like you face due to lack of automations, here are some of the major ones:

Overcome automation challenges with
ServiceDesk Plus MSP

Having automation features isn't just a good-to-have luxury, it's a MUST for MSPs to have in their service desks. ServiceDesk Plus MSP comes with a range of automation capabilities that help tackle these challenges and unlock a variety
of advantages, such as:

Automate ticket handling to reduce human errors

Business Rules help you systematize ticket handling by enabling a variety of condition-based actions like routing tickets to specific technicians based on ticket parameters, or triggering contextual notifications across the ticket life cycle, and more. By removing the need for human intervention, business rules reduce human error, free up technicians' time, and improve ticket handling.

Set up conditions by factoring in ticket parameters and updating fields.

Reduce service delays by automatically classifying ticket priority

With the Priority Matrix, you can automate the assignment of priorities based on the ticket's impact and urgency. By automatically assigning the right priority to a ticket, you can ensure that they are addressed in order of their importance with the necessary attention, thereby minimizing service disruptions.

Assign priorities automatically to reduce manual processes

Assign tickets to technicians automatically based on availability

Technician Auto Assign helps you assign tickets automatically using Round Robin or Load Balancing algorithms, while factoring in the availability of technicians. Additionally, to ensure service continuity, you can set up a backup technician and a backup approver in case a technician is unavailable.

Assign technicians based on algorithms and technician availability

Set up backup technician

Set up backup approver

Set account-specific SLA policies to ensure timely escalations and ticket resolution

Set client expectations for service delivery with account-specific SLAs by setting up response and resolution times for incoming tickets. Achieve maximum SLA compliance with the help of multi-level proactive and reactive SLAs. With this feature, you can keep stakeholders informed upon ticket escalations and automate actions like assigning the ticket to a particular group/technician, updating priority and more to ensure timely resolutions and minimize SLA violations.

Create unique SLA by setting response and resolution times, sending escalation notifications, and updating fields when tickets are escalated.

Establish standard operating procedures with visual workflows

Build visual workflows for requests and changes on the graphical workflow builder to set up standard operating procedures for different types of requests and changes. This ensures your technicians follow a set procedure before they close requests and changes, reducing the number of incorrect closure of tickets and poorly implemented changes.

Request Life Cycle for effectively handling incoming tickets.

Change Workflows for controlling the entire life cycle of your change processes.

Streamline communication with stakeholders and close tickets appropriately

Notification Rules helps you structure your communications by automatically informing stakeholders through contextual and customizable notifications. Closure Rules helps you collect the right details by mandating the fields that need to be filled before tickets can be closed. These features ensure you can provide real-time updates to stakeholders and reduce incorrect closure of tickets.

Notification rules to communicate with stakeholders during key events.

Request Closing rules for automating the closure of tickets

Sustain a healthy IT landscape by scheduling periodic maintenance operations

Automate the performance of periodic maintenance activities to maintain operational efficiency utilizing the Maintenance module. You can create maintenance tickets, schedule periodic maintenance activities with configurable intervals, and track all maintenance requests in one place. By ensuring maintenance activities are properly carried out, you can minimize the probability of outages caused by negligence.

Create maintenance tasks for executing maintenance activities andscheduling tasks periodically as required

Leverage AI chat bots to deal with L1 tickets and free up technicians' time

Zia, Zoho's AI assistant, helps you adopt a shift-left approach and gives users instant support for L1 issues. Zia can suggest relevant solutions and announcements to users and encourage self-help. Zia helps users raise requests, search for tickets, and perform other service desk actions with simple and intuitive instructions. Additionally, service desk teams can build comprehensive conversations workflows for common issues that enable Zia to offer meaningful responses to users and improve user experiences. With Zia, you can free up your technicians' time and let them focus on business critical tasks.

Deal with L1 tickets and execute quick actions

Customer experience is a focal point for MSPs, and automations give MSPs an advantage by streamlining and optimizing service delivery. Automations help MSPs define standard operating procedures and free up technicians from repetitive tasks like ticket assignment, classification, routing, and more. Additionally, automations help reduce errors and standard service experiences. In this article, we saw how a capable MSP platform like ServiceDesk Plus MSP can help you infuse automations into your daily service delivery operations to overcome common service delivery challenges.

What are you waiting for? Streamline your IT operations and deliver superior managed services to your clients starting today! Download a free 30-day trial and experience the power of automations in ServiceDesk Plus MSP.