As a Customer Service Manager, your goal is to increase client satisfaction, but it can be difficult, impossible even, to improve your client's happiness without utilizing data. One of the toughest parts of using data, is knowing what data to use in the first place! If you’re measuring the wrong metrics on your customer service dashboard, you may be tricking yourself into thinking that your team is working efficiently, your clients are satisfied and your goals met.   That’s why it’s so important to be tracking the correct metrics. By using one of our best practice templates when setting up your dashboard, you can ensure that you have all of the gauges that are necessary for service success. Let’s take a closer look: 1. Tickets Opened Today By monitoring the number of tickets opened today, you can know within seconds how big of a workload your team has. This data allows you to ensure you have enough staff to handle the incoming tickets and can help you identify and react when something happens that causes the number of support tickets to spike. 2. Tickets Closed Today This metric gives you an idea of how efficiently your team is performing. If the number of tickets closed today isn’t consistently keeping up with the number of tickets opened, you may need to consider hiring more staff or changing some workplace practices to increase team performance. 3. New Tickets Important for tracking SLAs, the number of new tickets allows you to see how many tickets are waiting to be assigned. These are tickets that haven’t even been looked at by a technician, and if you’re following best practices this number should aim to be 0 at all times. If you notice that this number isn’t at zero your average time to response is increasing and you need to address it! 4. Assigned Tickets Assigned tickets are the tickets that have been responded to and are already assigned to a technician. These tickets are sitting in the person’s queue and serve as another indication of how you are doing in terms of your SLAs. If the number of assigned tickets is too high, then your average time to resolution plan is increasing. 5. In Progress Tickets If you monitor the number of tickets that are currently in progress, you’re actually checking the performance in relation to another key metric: average time to resolution. The number of tickets in progress also gives a good indication of how well your team is performing. 6. Resolved Tickets Resolved Tickets is the last metric that contributes to your SLAs. In most cases, this is the best of the SLA metrics for measuring performance. This indicates the number of tickets your team has resolved today. 7. Unassigned Tickets With unassigned tickets you start measuring the metrics that will allow you to manage by exception. Ideally, this number is always at 0. If there are unassigned tickets, you’ve got a problem because if a customer responds, no one will see the ticket and it will go unresolved. This allows you to quickly identify one of these situations before it occurs! 8. Customer Responded Tickets This is another metric you’ll always want to be at 0, because if not, it means the customer has sent a response, but your team has not yet seen the reply. Ideally you’ll always send the last word as it contributes to a pleasant customer experience. Tracking this number allows you to see when that’s not happening, giving you the power to look into why your team isn’t responding to your clients. 9. Waiting on Customer Tickets By tracking tickets that are waiting on a customer response, you are able to follow up with what could be a potential issue. Typically, tickets fall into this category when a customer hasn’t responded in over 3 days. It could be a sign that they didn’t receive the response or maybe they are on vacation and you need to reach out a second time. Either way, this allows you to know when it’s time to follow up on tickets. 10. Tickets Past Due Tickets that are past due typically have a certain time and date assigned to them, and for whatever reason they were not resolved during that window of time. This could be a result of a ticket that has been resolved but isn’t marked properly, or it could be a true case where the work hasn’t been performed on time. Either way a great indicator of tickets that need immediate attention and may require resetting expectations with the client. 11. Currently Open Tickets by Type Usually presented in the form of a pie chart, currently open tickets by type will show you areas where your team may be struggling and will need to focus on. It also allows you to identify trends that contribute towards the number of tickets being submitted, allowing you to create a strategy to cut down on the number of tickets you are receiving. 12. Stale Tickets Stale tickets are tickets that haven’t been updated in 7 days. This metric is both a manage by exception metric and a compliance metric. This number should be at 0 at all times. Best practices say that a ticket should be updated within 7 days at the latest, so if you’ve got stale tickets you need to find out why and how you can stop them. 13. Average Time to Respond - Last 14 Days Average time to respond is the amount of time it takes to go from new to assigned. The lower the better - if you’ve got a high number here, finding out why should be a priority. 14. Average Time to Resolution Plan Your average time to resolution plan is the amount of time it takes for your team to start working on the ticket (In Progress status). If this number is high, it’s possible that your technicians have too many tickets in their backlog and they need an extra hand. Typical best in class companies aim to keep this number under 4 Hours. 15. Average Time to Resolution Average time to resolution shows how long it takes for a ticket to get resolved. This provides insight into how quickly your team is solving problems. Typical best in class companies aim to keep this number under 8 hours indicating that on average all issues will be resolved “same day”. 16. Tickets Opened and Closed - Last 14 Days An overview of your tickets opened and closed in the last 14 days allows you to quickly see whether you’re ahead or behind. It also allows you to check for trends such as days where your team is not as efficient, or days when abnormally large amounts of tickets are submitted. What’s Next? Now that you know 16 metrics for your Service Management dashboard, keep the momentum going with Dashboard Best Practices: a webinar recording of the fundamentals that we see our most successful customers using to drive efficiency with data! You’ll learn: Top 5 rules for designing dashboards Most popular dashboards for Service, Sales, Management, and Finance Building the right client dashboard Driving competition the right way Management by exception Increasing transparency & efficiency About dashboard features: rotation, filtering, etc. and much more!

Raise your hand if you love new integrations. To be honest, we get really pumped about announcing new datasources we’ve added. Our latest is a big one: Auvik! Many of you have been anticipating this and we’re happy to tell you that it’s now available to connect with. Auvik is an efficient and profitable way for MSPs to manage network infrastructure by providing awareness about network devices and notifications for events, usage, and health stats. When you integrate BrightGauge and Auvik, you get the visibility you need to stay ahead of network issues and protect your client’s business operations. How to connect to Auvik Important note: Auvik API access must be first granted to your account in order to get started with this integration. To do this, please contact your partner success manager at Auvik and request access. Once you have access, it takes just a couple more steps. When you’re in your BrightGauge overview page, click on DATA to get the dropdown menu, then select Datasources. Select Auvik from the RMM category, follow any prompts, and that should get you set up. If you’re looking for more detailed instructions, please check out our Auvik support doc. Want to sign up for BrightGauge? Contact our sales team today to schedule a live one-on-one demo.   What do I get out of the box? It’s quite important to have access to your data right away, because you’ve got work to do! This is especially true when it comes to something as sensitive as your client’s networks. So, when you integrate with Auvik, you’re going to find 20 pre-built gauges, 5 default dashboards, and 1 default report to help you get things started. Gauges The default gauges that come with the Auvik integration involve all the details surrounding your client’s networks. Gauges include Device Details, Entity Audits by Week, Interfaces by Op Status, Offline Printers, Servers, and Workstations, Scan Status by Network Type, and Total Devices. Dashboards These pre-built dashboards break up your network statistics into different buckets to give you a 10,000 foot view of your important metrics. The 5 dashboards are Devices, Entity Audits, Entity Notes, Interfaces, and Networks. Report   One default report will give you a running start on being transparent and building up trust with your clients. The Auvik Summary compiles your client’s network metrics and shows them exactly how you’ve been keeping things running. If you’ve got questions about our Auvik integration, please feel free to submit a support ticket or contact us and we’ll be happy to help you out.

Advice relating to good business practices can be endless (and beneficial). Determining what makes one business successful over another is not always black and white. But there’s one rule of thumb that everyone can seem to agree on: trust and transparency are key when it comes to maintaining long-term relationships that are a pillar for success. It’s really quite simple to understand. If clients trust you, then they’ll stick with you and they’ll tell other people about you, which means you’ll gain more and better business, which means more cash will be flowing in. There are many ways to build up trust, and it all comes down to being reliable and consistent. Build trust by sending out executive client reports As an MSP, your clients are paying you for specific and really important services. When an SLA was signed, the client gave you their trust in exchange for your word.  But that sort of blind trust is not sustainable. Now it’s on you to prove your worth and show that you’re true to your word. That is precisely what client reports help you do. When you send reports to clients, you are literally showing how you are or are not meeting your SLA points. Since they report on both the good and the bad, reports make you really transparent. You’re not hiding behind anything and you’re not skirting the truth. Think about how good and credible this makes you look. But we’ve heard from many peers in our industry that MSPs are shying away from sending regular reports simply because they are incredibly time-consuming and complicated to create. Typically, creating custom reports involves pulling data from whatever PSA, RMM, or other tool you’re using, spitting that data into an Excel spreadsheet, creating pivot tables and complex formulas, digging for the results you’re looking for, and then converting those results into digestible charts.    We know from experience that this can eat up 8 to 10 hours a week. The importance of reports is clear but dedicating a full workday to creating them is not a very efficient use of time. The loss of productivity that comes with focusing on that versus revenue-generating tasks can end up harming your business in the end. BrightGauge solves the client reporting dilemma Creating custom executive client reports doesn’t have to be painful and it doesn’t have to mean sacrificing other areas of your business. With BrightGauge, it takes just a few minutes to generate powerful reports that are custom, interactive, and automated. If you’re worried about what exactly to include in your reports, you can start by using one of our pre-built templates. Whether you integrate with ConnectWise Manage, QuickBooks, Veeam, Webroot, IT Glue, or any of our datasources, we offer default templates that are automatically available in your account. Templates can still be customized to your preference. Regardless of if you choose to start from scratch or use a pre-built, you can save your report as a template and schedule it to go out automatically on the date and time you choose, to the recipients you want.     What used to take 10 hours a week now takes a couple of minutes. Even better, the payoff is huge because clients can rest easy knowing a comprehensive report will be delivered to their inboxes on a consistent basis. As you look towards the future of your MSP, consider implementing this solid business practice. Don’t be surprised if your churn rate starts improving. Want to see BrightGauge reports, dashboards, and gauges in action? Contact us today to schedule a live one-on-one demo.