In today's fast-paced digital landscape, MSPs face increasing demands to deliver reliable, efficient, and proactive IT services to their clients. To meet these challenges head-on, many are turning to the power of business automation.
Business automation refers to the use of technology to streamline and automate various operational processes and tasks. It can turn tiresome, repetitive processes into automated workflows.
For MSPs, the benefits of this approach are significant. Not only will this slash the likelihood of human error and boost client satisfaction, it also promises to substantially reduce demands on employees — helping your business to do more with less.
The necessity of automation in the MSP landscape
IT environments have become broader and more complex in recent years, and MSPs in particular must find ways to stay ahead of the game.
Remote-first and hybrid work models — some of which must support bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies — are increasingly prevalent, making effective data protection both more complicated and more critical. Cybercriminals, meanwhile, are using new tools like AI and machine learning to create and launch attacks at incredible scale.
As the need for managed IT and security services increases, MSPs are poised for explosive growth. But that growth comes with its own challenges — signing and maintaining clients, hiring new employees, learning/managing new solutions and preserving a positive customer experience along the way.
Today’s MSPs find themselves frequently adopting new, more powerful backup and cybersecurity solutions, adding to a sprawling web of disparate tools that they must attempt to manage. As they take advantage of strong growth opportunities, they must hire and train more staff to keep up with demands. These actions feel necessary, yet they can drain significant resources and undercut your goals.
The benefits of adopting automation solutions
To tackle these and other challenges, companies around the world are increasing their use of business automation solutions. MSPs are particularly well-positioned to take advantage of automation, with benefits for technicians as well as those in other departments such as billing.
Done correctly, automation will help service providers to:
- Increase revenue capture and demonstrate your value to clients by more accurately tracking time spend on tickets.
- Improve client trust with automated, error-free billing that offers complete traceability of time and services invoiced.
- Gain invaluable performance insights by analyzing account data and highlighting your most profitable clients, services and products.
- Improve service desk efficiency with integrated ticket management, SLA tracking and capacity planning.
- Bolster morale as the most tedious aspects of account management, technical support and billing are taken off employees’ plates.
- Streamline expenditures by supporting business growth while limiting the need for increased headcount to match.
Of course, simply adopting any old automation solution and trying to force it into your workflow can cause more problems than it solves. A robust automation platform for MSPs will ideally integrate with the tools you already rely on, making it a snap to implement time-saving measures that suit your business’ unique requirements.
Getting started with business automation — purpose-built for MSPs
Let’s take a look at one popular business automation solution that was purpose-built for MSPs: the Advanced Automation pack for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud.
Acronis takes an approach that emphasizes centralized control and management. The solution supports a holistic view of your infrastructure and client environments. MSPs can monitor and manage everything from a single console, eliminating the need for multiple interfaces. Key metrics can be aggregated and analyzed to help you identify trends, make data-driven decisions and generally improve your service offering.
With automated, scheduled generation of invoices, this solution simplifies billing processes and reduces demands for customer support, two common drains on MSPs’ resources. And because time spent service tickets and accounts is automatically tracked, the Advanced Automation pack helps you to accurately capture every billable hour as well as the utilization of consumption-based services — boosting revenues while more fully demonstrating your value to clients.
Acronis’ Advanced Automation pack is easy to fit into your existing workflow. It integrates with a wide range of popular accounting (Quickbooks, Freshbooks, Sage and others) and RMM (including Kaseya and N-able) software tools. There’s no need to move away from the solutions you already know and trust, and no need to train staff on something entirely new.
Conclusion
As MSPs adopt new, more technically advanced solutions, they must also find ways to control expenditures, make sense of their data, and keep the client experience smooth. Increasingly complex processes and information overload are major challenges that threaten to increase time spent on management, and to stifle growth.
Embracing automation can alleviate each of these challenges. Streamlining operations, boosting revenue and supporting a better experience for your clients — the opportunities are clear. Automation is the key to the modern MSPs’ success.
Learn more about Acronis’ business automation solutions for MSPs
This guest blog is courtesy of Acronis. Read more Acronis guest blogs here. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of ChannelE2E’s sponsorship program.
