Managed service providers (MSPs) are all too familiar with ticketing and its many nuances.
However, one of the biggest challenges for MSPs is separating the incidents – or “problems” – from the service/change management requests. Even though these ultimately generate tickets as well, they often get dropped in the same bucket as the problem reports and muddled into one big pool of tickets.
While that’s not a technical issue per se, it’s a missed opportunity for engagement and client empowerment.
At CloudRadial, we believe that strategically splitting apart the problem report and service request ticket areas can both organize your ticket structure better and offer several key benefits that you hadn’t seen before.
So, that’s exactly what we did.
Today, we’re going to take a deeper look into the service catalog and dive into the three biggest reasons that drive our rationale.
When an MSP turns a prospect into a client, there’s a lot of work involved.
Ultimately, the primary focus is on taking their business needs and correlating them to the MSP’s service offerings and delivering on those offerings. During that process, an MSP will highlight the necessary services to render and then put them into a visible format (like a contract or agreement).
But what about after the client signs up? How do they know what else they can get from the MSP?
That’s where a service catalog becomes critical. With a catalog, you can always defer them to a list of your up-to-date service offerings that they can pick from at any time.
That means 24/7 on-demand visibility to any service they may need. As their business grows and evolves, the service catalog will serve as their go-to place to request additional services as needed.
Common examples of service catalog items that MSPs include are:
Of course, that’s not an exhaustive list – since the service catalogs are customizable forms, the sky is the limit as far as what you can use them for.
While the benefits of establishing a client-facing catalog are straightforward, there are a whole other set of internal-facing benefits: mainly, the routing efficiency.
In CloudRadial, the service catalog items can be routed differently than the typical problem reports.
These service request tickets are commonly routed to a different department compared to the problem tickets (or at least different boards/queues within the PSA tools). This keeps everything organized from the very origination point of the request.
Having the ability to organize the request to go to the right teams internally cuts down both the triage time and resources required to fulfill the request. It also cuts down on the chances of potentially lost revenue from forgetting or losing track of a service request, which usually finds its demise within a cluttered email inbox of an individual person.
And aside from just routing, there’s also the ability to do more automation within CloudRadial.
For example, there’s the confirmation section – a request for one thing may spur the need for another, so having a section to remind the user to check out another ticket, if necessary, can be handy.
Need a deeper dive into confirmation messages? Check out this article on our TimeZest integration.
Within these tickets, you can also establish other things like webhooks to Slack or Microsoft Teams for added team visibility. You can even go as far as to have CloudRadial generate PowerShell scripts for you to help make the process of provisioning and ordering as smooth as possible on the backend.
The end goal here is to make the process of requesting services as smooth as possible for both parties – which means more money in the pocket of the MSP for less effort.
The beauty of CloudRadial’s multi-feature approach is that no single feature steals the show.
The idea is to have features, such as the service catalog, serve as one of the many reasons clients visit the portal.
Make sure to put the service catalog in a greater context of client experience alongside the ability to submit tickets, view open/closed tickets, get employee training, launch line of business applications, view reports, and more.
That helps the client get a more rounded-out view of the entire portal – rather than seeing it as a tool that they only go to on a need-to-use basis; they can be trained to go here as often as possible because the portal genuinely adds value to their business.
In short, separating the service catalog from the problem reports and making it stand on its own makes it add yet another valuable reason to come back, day by day.
The service catalog can add an additional passive revenue stream for an MSP just by putting items in front of the client. And, it’s also great for client empowerment and stickiness.
Every CloudRadial tenant comes with a healthy dose of sample content to work with – so, if you’re struggling to come up with items on your own, you can always edit the sample set to suit your needs.
Want to take a stab at setting up your very own service catalog within CloudRadial? Get started with a trial and experiment for yourself.
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