More and more businesses are turning to MSPs or managed service providers to handle key IT functions. No wonder the MSP market has become worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
If you are a budding MSP, managing IT issues of thousands of businesses is never a cakewalk. Right from server downtime complaints to network security issues, there is a lot you need to deal with.
So is there any way to ease your pressure and delight IT end-users? Glad you asked!
A powerful MSP ticketing system can help you manage all IT complaints and requests from a centralized platform. Your IT technicians can interact with end-users on their favorite channels without switching between multiple tools.
In this blog, we will understand what MSPs are and why businesses choose to partner with them. Later, we will look at the benefits of MSP ticketing systems and explore the top 5 MSP help desk software that deserves your attention.
Let’s go!
What Is an MSP?
A managed service provider (MSP) refers to a third-party business entity that delivers services such as network, infrastructure, application, and security. These services can be offered either through communication channels such as phone, chat, email, etc., or via on-premise visits.
MSPs are outsourcing companies usually hired by small-to-mid-sized businesses, government agencies, or non-profits. They are assigned the responsibility of managing a client’s information technology (IT) infrastructure and end-user systems. Traditionally, the term MSP was used for infrastructure or device-related services. However, the term has expanded to include continuous maintenance, management, and support.
What Is an MSP Ticketing System?
An MSP ticketing system is designed to help MSP businesses track user complaints, requests, and issues in one place. Support technicians can assign tickets to each other, prioritize urgent issues, escalate them if necessary, and share faster responses.
With the best MSP ticketing system, you can share surveys with end-users to capture their valuable feedback instantly. You can even create an in-depth knowledge base to allow customers to find the right solutions at their own pace. In addition, managers can track key performance metrics such as average first response time, ticket resolution time, agent ratings, and more.
Why Do Customers Choose to Partner With MSPs?
The demand for MSPs is skyrocketing each year. According to Statista, the managed services market is expected to exceed $300 billion by the end of 2027.
Partnering with a managed service provider can reduce costs, boost efficiency, improve service scalability, and add value to your business. Let’s explore these benefits in more detail.
1. Reduce Costs
Purchasing new equipment or renting out additional office space can drastically increase your expenditure. Moreover, hiring and training IT support staff members can prove to be quite expensive and impact your budget.
When you outsource IT functions your services to an MSP, you can save costs in the long run. The MSP is responsible for managing employee hiring, retention, and training on its own. Moreover, they are also responsible for making necessary technological investments from time to time.
2. Get Access to Skilled Resources
The IT support professionals employed by MSPs undergo rigorous training sessions to hone the right skills. You can make the most of this talent pool and enhance your process efficiency.
MSP staff members have years of experience in offering IT support to businesses belonging to a wide range of industries. So when it comes to reliable support, they can be your best bet.
3. Focus on Internal Operations
When you partner with an MSP, you can rest assured that you will be provided quality services. You can sign an SLA (service level agreement) contract to ensure there is no expectation gap. This allows you to focus on your core internal operations and grow your business.
You can even free up your internal employees and allow them to focus on their own tasks. For example, imagine you have an IT support team that is already bombarded with external projects. If they have to deal with your company’s IT infrastructure, your projects can suffer, and you can lose important clients.
4. Enjoy Scalability & Compliance
As your business grows, so does your IT infrastructure, such as PCs, servers, networks, etc. It might not be possible for you to hire additional staff to keep up with your rapid growth.
On the other hand, managed service providers will be more than happy to scale their teams and services to meet your growing requirements. This will help you quickly adapt to IT changes and prevent unplanned downtime. In addition, the leading MSPs are compliant with the various rules and regulations pertaining to your geographical area or country.
Importance of Good Ticketing Software for MSPs
To reach your full potential and deliver top-notch IT support, you need the right ticketing software. Here is how ticketing software for MSPs can benefit your business:
1. Capture Requests From Multiple Channels
MSP help desk ticketing system can help you capture IT support requests and complaints from a wide range of channels. For instance, you can allow end-users to share their issues via email, live chat messages, phone support, or web forms.
This helps your agents to consolidate all messages in one place and respond faster. They don’t have to switch between multiple tools or strive hard to locate a single ticket. Moreover, agents can even apply filters to keep the help desk inbox well-organized.
Read More: Choose the Best Customer Support Channels for Your Growing Business
2. Leverage Automation for Faster Ticket Resolution
Powerful automation features can help MSP organizations resolve more IT tickets in less time. In addition, you can avoid human errors, rise above manual work, and speed up the issue resolution process.
So, what automation features can you expect?
For a start, you can choose to automatically assign incoming support tickets to the relevant members of your team. You can also share automated email notifications and alerts with key stakeholders to keep them informed about the ticket progress. There are multiple ways you can create automated workflows to reduce agent workload and delight end-users.
Read More: 10 Service Desk Automation Ideas that Boost Performance and Quality
3. Empower End-Users With Self-Service
One feature that MSPs can benefit the most from is a self-service help center. It can empower end-users to find relevant information in the form of step-by-step guides, help articles, FAQs, videos, and more.
While creating your knowledge base, It’s important to ensure it offers an advanced search functionality. This will make it easier for people to find relevant solutions and reduce the burden on your IT support technicians.
In addition to this, you can even create a dedicated user portal. End-users can simply log in to the portal using their credentials and submit their request or complaints. They can even track the progress of their ongoing tickets without interrupting your team with further messages.
Read More: Best Knowledge Base Software & Tools for 2022
4. Track IT Support Metrics
To grow your MSP business, you need to consistently offer quality IT support. But how do you monitor the service quality?
MSP ticketing systems can help you get a 360-degree view of your team’s performance. You can monitor critical help desk metrics with the help of reports and dashboards.
For instance, you can get the answer to the question, “how quickly do we respond to customers?” with the average ticket response time metric. Similarly, you can even monitor how customers rate your agents based on their knowledge or overall support experience.
Read More: 15 Help Desk Metrics to Improve Customer Support
5. Monitor the End-User Experience
Whether you assist employees or direct consumers of other companies, capturing their feedback is important.
In-depth feedback from end-users will help you realize where you stand and give you rich insights into how, and more importantly, where you can improve. With the best MSP ticketing software, you can share surveys with end-users at predefined intervals.
For example, you can ask, “How satisfied are you with your recent support interaction?” or “On a scale of 1-5, how well did our technician meet your expectations?” You can monitor the survey feedback in real-time and contact those who share negative ratings.
In addition, surveys also make people feel that your business cares about their time and opinions.
5 Top MSP Ticketing Systems To Consider
Now, it’s time to review some of the top MSP ticketing system options available in the market. We will explore what features these tools can bring to the table and how much they will cost your business.
1. ProProfs Help Desk
ProProfs Help Desk offers a free MSP ticketing system to manage all your IT requests and incidents in one place. With an omnichannel approach, you can interact with end-users on their favorite channels – email, live chat, help center, and web forms.
This powerful tool allows you to create dedicated self-service portals for your different clients. This way, you can encourage self-service, reduce ticket volume, and save more. In addition, you can share automated email surveys with end-users to monitor and improve their service experiences.
Top Features of ProProfs Help Desk:
- Develop powerful chatbots to offer 24×7 assistance
- Break complex issues into smaller tickets with parent-child ticketing
- Create canned responses for different situations to save time
- Create a user portal and allow end-users to track the progress of their tickets
- Monitor ticket response time, resolution time, and agent ratings
Pricing:
Starts at $20/agent/month (billed annually).
2. Freshdesk
Freshdesk’s ticketing system comes with an easy-to-use interface and powerful automation. For instance, you can automate agent workflows and develop intuitive bots to resolve routine questions.
Freshdesk even offers multiple team collaboration features to resolve tickets quickly and efficiently. You can interact with team members right inside a ticket and leave notes to share contextual information with others.
Top Features of Freshdesk:
- Avoid sharing duplicate replies with the agent collision detection feature
- Prevent reopening of support tickets when end-users respond with a thank you
- Convert ticket replies to knowledge-base articles
- Automatically assign tickets to agents based on their workload or skills
- Monitor the customer experience with customer satisfaction reports
Pricing:
Starts at $15/agent/month
3. Zendesk
Zendesk is undeniably one of the most popular MSP help desk software in the market. Despite its heavy pricing, you can expect some robust features such as automated ticket assignments, multichannel ticketing, reports, and more.
Zendesk gives you multiple options to empower customers to help themselves. For instance, you can create a community forum and allow like-minded customers to ask questions and offer solutions.
Top Features of Zendesk:
- Build an integrated help center to allow customers to find answers on their own
- Use AI-powered bots to give agents more context
- Interact with customers via email, live chat, messaging, and social media
- Automatically escalate issues to relevant IT support representatives
- Monitor metrics such as CSAT, ticket volume, and more
Pricing:
Starts at $49/agent/month
4. Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk is a context-aware ticketing system that allows MSPs to use the power of customer context to personalize interactions at scale. With a powerful knowledge base, your business can easily cater to your global audience and support them 24/7.
The tool allows you to capture tickets from multiple channels – emails, live chat, social media, and web forms. Simply build a robust community forum and empower end-users to find solutions at their own pace.
Top Features of Zoho Desk:
- Integrate with Zoho CRM to view complete customer information
- Share help center articles in chat or email replies
- Interact with customers on the leading social media platforms
- Leverage the mobile app to manage IT tickets on the move
- Map your knowledge base to your own domain and improve search rankings
Pricing:
Starts at $1/agent/month
Read More – Zoho Desk Alternatives
5. ServiceDesk Plus
ServiceDesk is another powerful IT ticketing solution that can help you convert end-user requests, complaints, and issues into unique tickets. You can manage the complete lifecycle of incidents and request tickets.
With ServiceDesk Plus, agents can offer multi-channel support to end-users by allowing them to submit tickets via email, phone calls, and a self-service portal. In addition, you can communicate with end-users better using automated email notifications.
Top Features of ServiceDesk Plus:
- Automatically assign incoming tickets based on agent expertise
- Define SLAs for response and resolution times
- Use proactive escalations to avoid SLA violations
- Share customer surveys at predefined intervals
- Maintain quality of help center articles with an approval process
Pricing:
Starts at $10/technician/month
Get Started With the Best MSP Ticketing System
It would be right to say that a good MSP ticketing system is the backbone of every MSP business. As more and more businesses look to outsource their IT functions to MSPs, the stakes are higher than ever.
With a powerful ticketing system for MSPs, you can capture requests from multiple channels, automate your workflows, empower users with self-service, track IT support metrics, and measure the end-user experience with intuitive surveys.
If you are on the hunt for such a tool, ProProfs Help Desk can be your ideal solution. You can automatically assign IT tickets to agents, build powerful chatbots, and respond faster with canned responses. Ready to delight your IT end-users?
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