Atera RMM, PSA for MSPs Gains Live Chat Capabilities

For a service desk technician, two key metrics can determine your effectiveness: Customer satisfaction and time to resolution. Improve your time to resolution and you'll likely boost customer satisfaction.

It sounds simple -- but sometimes complications arise. For a technician, it can be extremely frustrating when you are waiting for users to answer a question or test something. Plus, responses through a ticketing system or through email can get lost in the shuffle. When a user is unresponsive it is difficult to get the ticket closed out in a timely manner, and sometimes they can sit in the queue for weeks waiting on a response.

That's why customers and service technicians increasingly turn to live chat technology. Indeed, 92 percent of customers feel satisfied when they are using live chat. Through a chat program, questions on both sides are answered immediately, and tickets can be resolved quickly.

Atera Extends Cloud PSA, RMM With Live Chat

Amid that reality, a growing number of IT service management software companies incorporate chat and chatbots into their platforms for MSPs. Just ask Atera, which has extended its cloud-based PSA (professional services automation) and RMM (remote monitoring) platform to include Atera Live Chat.

MSPs that adopt the platform will receive an alert whenever a customer is waiting for chat help. MSPs, in turn, can transform the conversation into a support ticket where necessary. From there, the technician can send the issue to a manager or colleague who more specific expertise in the matter, or even put a pin in a conversation when the customer gets called away.

Atera continues to offer a unique pricing model for its product. Instead of charging per device monitored by its platform, the company charges per technician accessing the service. With users carrying multiple devices, and IoT devices making their way into business environments, that could bea practical pricing model for many MSPs to adopt.

We'll be watching to see if Live Chat evolves to offer chatbot features.