Documentation is an essential and integral part of any MSP business, but can it be harming your company's productivity in the process? In an age that has become so digital and technical, many MSPs still struggle with the problem of manual documentation.
Many hours each week are spent inputting new, and updating current, customer data. In doing so, information may not always be up-to-date and can be lost in the process… keeping MSPs in the kiddie pool, yelling for mom to help with the overwhelming problems they are facing.
How Manual Documentation Hurts MSPs
Manual Documentation requires an extra person or two consistently updating accounts each week. This limits what can be spent by the MSP on product development, employee salaries, marketing, etc.
Additionally, this information is only as accurate as when it was last updated, which could result in weeks or months going by while other tasks have taken precedence. Without accurate and updated information, it may take longer to address other pertinent issues.
Among the potential problem areas:
- The process of onboarding a new customer can run slower as employees have to comb through and manually enter all the necessary information to cater to their needs.
- As problems arise with customer environments, it will also take longer to address as MSPs wait for the updated information.
- In other cases, these MSPs could be blamed for mishaps in the environments they have been managing when they actually made no changes which caused a problem to occur.
- Manual documentation does not allow for MSPs to determine when exactly changes were made in their customer’s environments.
- In addition, MSPs are unable to determine who made specific changes. With manual documentation, they are only able to input the information they receive after the fact, instead of reporting it as it occurs.
Play in the Big Kids' Pool
Automate documentation! Get ahead of the competition and have more preparation when taking on new clients. Through automating documentation an MSP will be well-versed in a new client’s environment with immediate access to their information. The MSP can then gauge what specific services are required and accurately cater to the client’s needs. Furthermore, they will be able to manage clients more efficiently through knowing all updates made in their client’s environments throughout a span of time. MSPs will be able to go back day by day and see when an update was made and by who. This can in turn can help an MSP determine what actually happened and be able to reset the system back to before an error occurred.
Updating the documentation process will help throughout all aspects of the client’s journey including onboarding, help desk, client retention, and more! In this day and age, it doesn’t make sense not to automate. Save time, money, and sanity through automation.
If you don’t know where to begin on your automation process, check out Liongard’s Roar! Roar is constantly working for you and updating information as it is updated in each and every one of your client’s environments. So, what are you waiting for… take a dive in the big kid’s pool and see how it can help your MSP!
More: To see Roar in action, sign up for our live weekly webinars.
Guest blog courtesy of Liongard. Read more Liongard blogs here.
