Here are five ways neglected work impacts MSPs:
When technicians have many tickets in progress, they spend a lot of time selecting which ticket to work on next and then reviewing the ticket details to remind themselves what’s already happened with it. The longer a ticket has been neglected, the longer it takes to review. This time is wasted- they could be spending it actually working on the ticket.
A large number of tickets also take longer for service managers to review and monitor, results in more work for dispatchers who do calendar dispatching, and makes for longer team meetings.
Even when offering managed services, many MSPs continue to do certain types of billable service or project work. When a ticket is started and then abandoned, the initial time invested by the technician might take a long time to be billed. Think of unbilled time as a large accounts receivable balance- it’s something to be avoided if at all possible.
On the other hand, if tickets are billed when they’re incomplete, the customer is more likely to question the charge.
If the ticket is started, completed, and billed in a short period of time, then revenue is maximized and the customer is happy to pay.
Technicians with a large number of neglected tickets feel more stress than those with few tickets. They have to make more decisions throughout the day- which of my many tickets should I resume working? When will I have enough time to reduce this large queue of work?
They also have concerns about if a customer will respond asking for an update on a ticket- resulting in a ticket that needs to be treated urgently.
When there are a large number of in-progress and neglected tickets, the team becomes less responsive. It takes longer and longer to start new work because of the large amount of work already in progress. And when a technician does get to start new work, he or she is more likely to be interrupted because of the large number of tickets in progress that could suddenly become urgent or require a response to the customer. It’s a nasty cycle.
Finally, the worst way MSPs are impacted by neglected work is in the poor experience customers receive when their needs are neglected. When it takes a long time for tickets to be completed, customers wonder if it’s worthwhile asking for help from the MSP. And when they need to follow up to ask about the status of a ticket, they begin to think about changing providers. Regularly allowing neglected work in an MSP harms your relationship with your customers and makes them wonder how much you care about them.
You don’t have to sit around watching tickets become stale. Take back control using the techniques in the No More Neglect whitepaper. We teach how to define neglect thresholds, use built-in ConnectWise or Autotask tools to identify the tickets that violate those thresholds, how to track useful metrics, and how to incorporate the reporting into your workflows so you can eliminate neglected work once and for all.