Transform your service delivery operations with these 8 ServiceDesk Plus MSP automations
July 19, 2023 5 minutes read
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:
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Manual ticketing
Improper and manual handling of tickets due to the absence of defined rules.
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Service delays
Ticket resolutions are delayed due to improper ticket classification.
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No backups
Unattended tickets due to the unavailability of technicians.
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Delayed resolutions
Inability to set deadlines and initiate proactive escalations
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Unstructured processes
Lack of standardization in ticket governance.
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Communication gaps
Missing real-time updates to stakeholders, and inconsistent closure of tickets
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Maintenance troubles
Unorganized and irregular maintenance activities
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Ticket overflow
A disproportionate number of L1 tickets means technicians are relegated to low-level tasks.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
About the author
Aditya Oswal, Product Marketing Analyst