It doesn’t matter if your company is currently run out of your parent’s basement or if you’re a 500+ man operation. If you’re considering a help desk solution, you need to ensure it has these 11 ...
It doesn’t matter if your company is currently run out of your parent’s basement or if you’re a 500+ man operation. If you’re considering a help desk solution, you need to ensure it has these 11 features: What to look for in any help desk solution Canned Replies Most tickets you’ll receive will be about similar, if not identical, topics. Rather than typing out a response each time, you can reply with a copy and paste response. This will save your team valuable time and help to complete more tickets. Internal Notes This undervalued feature allows teams to keep information centralized. If done right, it gives team members the ability to pick up where others left off. This is a must-have feature due to its ability to provide team members with all the information they need. Tagging and Filtering Tagging is a small but powerful feature that provides you with more detailed data and keeps tickets organized. Most help desks contain tagging as a feature, but you will want to filter your tickets as well. Look for how easy it is to tag and filter, then understand how filtering is handled. This will seem small now, but during everyday use, the difference is significant. Automation Automation will be more important in the future, but even now the feature offers a huge opportunity to increase service team efficiency. With automation, you can perform tasks like assigning tickets automatically. For example, subjects containing the word “invoice” can be tagged as billing and assigned to your billing person. Mobile App If your help desk has a mobile app, it can be a lifesaver. A mobile app will allow you to handle critical tickets anywhere at any time. This will present much better service to your customers, and will pay off when they become loyal followers and brand advocates. A word of advice: make sure you get some hands-on time with their app during the trial period, as not all apps are created equal! Ticket Management and Tracking At its core, a help desk is a ticketing solution. So you'd be tempted to think that they're all excellent at tracking and managing tickets. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Help desks can become so focused on the other features that they forget to improve ticket management! You’ll want to ensure that the help desk you choose presents tickets in an easily digestible way, shows enough details, and allows you to reassign and escalate tickets without hassle. Knowledge base Many help desks contain this feature, and with good reason. Knowledge bases help to reduce your ticket load and offer better service to customers. Just because a help desk offers a knowledge base, doesn’t mean you’re in the clear! You need to ensure that it’s easy to create and update articles, and that the knowledge base is easy for your customers to navigate. Customer History Keeping track of a customer’s past requests will help you both to identify trends, like who your problem customers are. You’ll also be able to identify repeated questions. User-Friendly Interface A user-friendly interface helps both your team and your customers. It can create a better experience for customers and increase your team's efficiency. A good help desk portal needs to be user-friendly for your customers, and shouldn’t need any training to use. On your end, it should be easy to view details, work with tickets, and be pleasant to spend a large amount of time in as your team will likely spend most of their time using the software! Easy to Implement with Good Documentation We touched on this above, but you should be able to implement your help desk within a month. (That means running at full capacity.) If it looks like it will take you longer than a month you shouldn’t be considering that help desk. Remember, you'll need to train your staff and your customers on using the new system. Your help desk should also have easy to follow documentation including how-to's, features, and troubleshooting. Stable App You don’t hear about this much, and it’s not a real feature, but we included it because it's so important. Without stability, your help desk can cause more problems than it fixes! Most help desks won’t crash outright, but there can be small bugs which affect performance. If you’re demoing a software, be on the lookout for these kinds of bugs. So tell us, which help desk features are most important to your business?
For our 30th episode, we welcomed special guest Brian Dosal, co-Founder and Head of Product here at BrightGauge. From an idea born out of the client reporting needs of a growing MSP to the complete data platform we’re building today, Brian gives us all the details of BrightGauge’s past, present, and future. If you’ve ever wanted to know more about our product, how we plan for and design each feature, a day in the life of building a SaaS product, or even which feature is our co-Founder’s favorite (or least favorite!), then join us for a special look at the BrightGauge journey. Episode Highlights: Brian’s Introduction and background (0:54) What excites you about BrightGauge now, after 6 years into the company? (3:28) Brian’s area of focus and a typical day as Head of Product (4:48) Customer feedback channels (8:23) In 6 years, how did BrightGauge get to where we are today? (10:58) Which feature are you most proud of, and which one needs the most love? (13:19) Balancing feature requests and improvements versus flexibility and ease of use (15:47) 2017 product themes and roadmap (18:26) Making the decision to release a new feature, knowing there are changes and iterations on the way (23:00) Planning themes more than a few months down the road (25:25) Planning new integrations and updating the existing ones (26:45) Following the SaaS industry 40-hour (uninterrupted) work week concept (28:36) Q&A: favorite BrightGauge feature, most underrated feature, best business book, best personal improvement resource, parting advice & how to reach Brian (36:40) Books as referenced in the episode: Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, by Gino Wickman Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur, by Derek Sivers Raising the Bar: Integrity and Passion in Life and Business (The Story of Clif Bar Inc.), by Gary Erickson Want to find out more about The BrightGauge Podcast? Check out all the episodes here.
In the last few years cloud popularity has been on the rise, but we find that plenty of people in the MSP industry still have questions have the trend. So we asked Jonathan Lieberman, co-Founder & CEO of Itopia cloud workspace to join us for a conversation about what’s really going on in the world of cloud software. How far into the cloud trend are we now? What are the common cloud security concerns? What signs should MSPs look for to confirm that it’s time to transition to the cloud? Join us for all the cloud insights you need to know. Trends in the Cloud: Episode Highlights Jonathan’s introduction and background (0:46) What are the contributing factors to rapid growth? Why are cloud solutions so popular now? (3:00) A typical day: where Jonathan spends his time as an Executive of a business growing at 140% (4:37) Current high level trends in the cloud (6:10) People seem to be very comfortable with moving email to the cloud, but overall, how far along in the cloud movement are most businesses? (8:07) Signals an MSP should look for when it comes to introducing the cloud (10:05) How Itopia addresses concerns about security in the cloud (11:46) The benefits of cloud for MSPs (13:06) A closer look at the types of MSPs doing business with Itopia (16:09) The onboarding and certification process with Itopia (19:40) Making the decision to focus on the software side of business (21:20) Advice for MSPs thinking about the cloud (22:35) Q&A: best business book recommendation, favorite personal improvement resource, how to reach Jonathan (24:54) Best business book as referenced in the episode: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, by Phil Knight Want to find out more about The BrightGauge Podcast? Check out all the episodes here.
If there's one thing that everyone knows about business metrics, it has to be this often-quoted advice: “what you measure, you will improve.” While true, there are some metrics that just aren’t worth measuring. A good business owner knows how to choose and measure the metrics that will improve core aspects of his or her business. Harvest time tracking and invoicing software contains several such metrics. Let's take a look at some of the most useful Harvest metrics: 6 Harvest Metrics you Need to Monitor Open Projects The metric provides a quick look at your current workload. It’s important to track the number of open projects because it will allow you to more efficiently manage your team and projects. Hours by Task MTD In essence, this gauge tracks where your team is spending time. This metric is often overlooked, but it’s so powerful when you’re looking to improve team efficiency. Without much effort on your part, you can identify the categories your team spends too much time on. Plus, if you filter by Technician you can identify training opportunities and even the ideal task fit for an employee. Amount Uninvoiced Monitoring the amount of hours that haven’t been invoiced yet will help you identify an issue that could affect monthly income. You’ll want to ensure all your hours are being invoiced and paid for. Stale Projects Stale Projects are typically projects in which hours have not been entered for 7 days or more. It is important to identify these and figure out why they are stale and what needs to be done to get them moving again. Projects Over Budget Projects that have required more hours than originally budgeted for should be a major red flag. You’ll want to monitor this in real-time to identify any potential issues and remedy them as fast as possible. Hours vs Budget This gauge is primarily used to track progress on your currently open projects, but can also be used to highlight when you’re over budget on a particular project. The Easiest Way to Track Harvest Metrics BrightGauge brings best practices to our customers with our dashboard templates. Each template is made by our Data Team to give you the best possible look into your business. Learn more about Harvest here.
“Data won’t give you all the answers, but it will help you ask better questions” explains Todd Kane, President of Evolved Management Consulting. For MSPs, Todd stresses the point that being data driven always starts with KPIs. From there, MSPs must ensure that they have an execution plan because numbers are irrelevant for those who don’t know how the numbers apply to their business and how to close the gap between starting point and goal. In his conversation with us, Todd shares 5 KPIs to measure MSP success, leadership insights, the top mistakes that MSPs make, and more. Data Won't Give You All the Answers: Episode Highlights Todd’s introduction and background (0:44) The pivot points (size and scope) when companies need consulting (3:39) Typical challenges these companies face (5:49) Current trends in the IT market: security and ransomware, hybrid architecture between on-prem and cloud-based infrastructure, and more (9:24) How do you help MSPs evolve from charging per device/user? (11:27) Best in class benchmarks for MSPs (13:08) Mistakes that MSPs are making: data hygiene, management methodology (15:45) 5 KPIs to measure your success and why they are important: Tickets per Seat, SLA Achievement, Utilization, NRR, and EBITDA (17:59) Data won’t give you the answer, but it will help you ask better questions: how do you help MSPs understand that it all starts with the right data in the right spot and make that transition? (24:53) How do you help clients understand the importance and benefits of SLAs? (26:46) “Leadership becomes a bottleneck in rapid growth”, the 2-pizza rule, and advice on management (31:14) Rapid-fire Q&A: best business book, favorite resource for personal improvement, parting advice, and how to reach Todd (35:50) Books as referenced in the episode: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t, Jim Collins The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, Peter Drucker Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, Simon Sinek Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, Gino Wickman Podcasts as referenced in the episode: MSP Radio by Continuum, Smart People Podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, Radiolab, Evolved Radio Want to find out more about The BrightGauge Podcast? Check out all the episodes here.
70+ Metrics for MSPs
Key metrics and accompanying formulas to help MSPs skyrocket growth and success!
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Want to skyrocket your MSP’s growth and success? This list of 59 metrics will help you choose the data to do so: Before we get started... An Important Note: Just because we’ve listed 59 metrics in this list, doesn’t mean that you should monitor all of these metrics at once. Monitoring all 59 metrics at one time is guaranteed to result in analysis paralysis. Instead, follow the rule of 3’s by assigning 3 metrics to each person in your leadership/management team. You can learn more about using the rule of 3’s when choosing metrics in this prior blog post. Prefer to download the list? Get all the metrics from this post, plus 20 extras, for free! With that said, let’s get started... Financial Metrics for MSPs Cash On Hand Keeping track of your cash flow will help you to stay out of financial trouble. Months of Cash Another way of looking at cash on hand, months of cash goes a step further by letting you know how long that cash will last you. Accounts Receivable Monitoring your receivables will allow you to see how much money is awaiting customer payment, which tells you how much money should be coming in during the next 30 days, and also alerts you as to which clients are not paying on time. Profit A no-brainer due to the popularity of the P&L statement, tracking your profit will enable you to see how well your business has performed and create a baseline for future data. Just note that this isn’t a real-time metric and only provides a look at the past performance of your business. Unpaid Invoices Tracking unpaid invoices allows you quickly and easily identify which client’s services need to paused or canceled. Overhead Your operating costs will provide insight into both how much revenue you need to bring in and whether you are operating with too little margins. Labor Costs Breaking overhead down a little, your labor costs will help to identify whether you are hiring more personnel than you can afford. Debt/Asset Ratio The Debt/Asset Ratio provides information on your business’s financial leverage. Utilization Utilization measures the actual revenue earned by assets and helps you identify if you could be operating more efficiently. Client Concentration More important for small to medium sized MSPs, client concentration is a powerful measurement that identifies the percent of profit that each client is responsible for. Revenue By Category Breaking down revenue by category will allow you to identify whether you need to diversify your sources of revenue or not. Service Gross Margin Services are a great business, but if you’re not monitoring your profit margin you could be making a big mistake! This allows you to ensure your business is performing as efficiently and successfully as possible. Service Team W2 Ratio Similar to service gross margin, this metric allows you to ensure your business is operating at peak efficiency and profitability. EBITDA Margin Standing for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, EBITDA margin is a measure of your company’s profitability and financial health. Total Customers Monitoring the number of total customers will give you a quick look at your MSPs health by allowing you to check for growth or loss. Customer Lifetime Value Customer lifetime value will help you know when to look at raising your rates and how and when you should look to increase your total customers. Sales Expense as a % of Revenue Your sales expenses as a percentage of revenue will help to identify how efficient your sales and marketing processes are and when to allocate more or less funds to sales and/or marketing. Sales and Marketing Metrics for MSPs Sales Growth Sales growth is one of the easiest ways to check if your business is growing, making it a popular metric for businesses to track. Sales Opportunities Tracking your sales opportunities will allow you to predict the number of new customers that will come in and ensure that you’ve got enough potential customers for your sales reps to reach out to. Quote to Close Your quote to close ratio is the average number of quotes that are sent before one is closed. It will help you identify potential issues with your quote, whether that’s price, timing, or some other factor. Age of Opportunity Looking at the age of each opportunity will allow you to recognize patterns for identifying when the ideal time to prioritize an opportunity is, increasing your close rate. Response Time Monitoring the response time of your sales reps will help you to ensure your sales cadence is being followed and doesn’t need to be changed or improved upon. Total Pipeline Dollars Tracking the number of dollars in the pipeline can help you predict how much revenue will come in the next month. Website Visitors While often considered a vanity metric, your website visitors can provide great value. For example, when combined with your average conversion rate you can use it to predict how many leads will be generated in the coming months. Bounce Rate Your bounce rate will let you know if the people visiting your site are finding what they were looking for or if they are getting frustrated and exiting your site. This is particularly important for SEO and PPC ads. Leads from Website The number of leads coming from your website will help to see its effectiveness in driving new customers to your MSP. Unique Blog Page Views Many MSPs have now begun to blog in order to offer increased value to their clients and help capture new leads. Monitoring the number of people who visit your blog will help you see the worth of this channel. Newsletter Views & Clicks If you send an email newsletter to your customers and/or a subscriber list, you can identify how much value it’s providing your company by analyzing how many people are viewing and clicking on your emails. Social Media Mentions Having a presence on social media is necessary today, and it’s crucial for a business to monitor their engagement on social media by tracking social media mentions. Market Growth Rate Monitoring market growth rate will allow you to predict whether there will be more customers for you to pursue or whether the market has reached its peak and it’s time to pivot towards a new customer base. Market Share Tracking your market share will also help to let you know when it’s time to move towards a new customer base or to keep pursuing customers in your current market. Brand Equity The measure of the value of your brand (not the company’s equity) is difficult to track but necessary for successful decision making. Imagine if the Ford Mustang was changed to be the Ford Fastback! The car’s sales would likely plummet. Track your brand equity to help drive brand growth and make better decisions. Cost per Lead Cost per lead helps you to establish which platforms are viable and whether you need to be charging your customers more for your services. Service Metrics for MSPs Technician Utilization Technician utilization is an often overlooked metric, but it can directly contribute to your business’s bottom line! Monitoring it will help to ensure that your service team is operating as efficiently as possible. SLA Adherence Complying with your SLAs is incredibly important for MSPs, and there’s no way to ensure you are doing so without measuring your SLA adherence! Customer Satisfaction Customer Satisfaction (also abbreviated as CSAT) is a measure of how satisfied a customer was with their experience. Monitoring CSAT scores will let you identify how happy your service team is leaving your customers. Tickets Opened Today Monitoring this metric will provide a quick look at what’s coming in and help you identify spikes in real time. Tickets Closed Today Looking at your tickets closed today will give you an idea of whether your team is ahead or falling behind in real time. Assigned Tickets by Technician Assigned tickets by technician will allow you to identify which technicians are your top performers and who could use a little coaching/training. In Progress Tickets Tickets that are in progress will allow you to see if your technicians are falling behind or keeping up with their tickets. Resolved Tickets Tracking the number of resolved tickets will allow you to see if your team is performing at the necessary levels to provide good customer service. Unassigned Tickets Many MSPs triage their tickets and assign them to technicians based on severity and topic. If your tickets are not being assigned fast enough you may need to consider changing your triage process. Customer Responded Tickets Another great metric to be tracking is the number of tickets in which a customer has responded but hasn’t yet received a response from your team. This allows you to identify whether your team is responding fast enough to tickets. Waiting on Customer Tickets Tracking the number of tickets that are waiting for a response from your customer will allow you to identify a potential issue before it happens. You may need to follow up more often or explore different methods of communication with your customer. Tickets Past Due Tickets past due will help you to ensure you are not falling behind on your ticket load. Tickets Opened By Client If you’re familiar with the Pareto Principle, you’ll know that 20% of your clients will account for 80% of your tickets. Monitoring tickets open by client will allow you to identify those clients and either charge them more, notify them so they can better train their employees, or fire them as a client. Tickets Open by Type By monitoring your tickets open by type, you can identify which category of tickets are responsible for the most open tickets and which are taking your team longest to resolve. Stale Tickets Sometimes a ticket goes without an update for an extended period of time. Normally, these tickets are lost, but by monitoring the number of stale tickets you can ensure all tickets are being followed up on in a timely manner. Average Time to Response Responsiveness is one of the key factors in determining whether a customer churns or becomes a promoter of your business. Tracking your average time to response will help you monitor and improve your responsiveness. Average Time to Acknowledgment Average time to acknowledgment will help you monitor whether you are hitting your SLAs or not. Average Time to Resolution Plan This is another metric to help track whether you’re reaching your SLAs. Average Time to Resolution Yet another metric for monitoring SLAs. Tickets Opened and Closed in the Last 14 Days Tracking the amount of tickets that have been opened and closed in the last 2 weeks will help you identify short term trends and see if your team is handling the number of tickets or is falling behind. Top Ticket Closers for the Week Leaderboards used to identify the reps who are closing the most support tickets will help to provide a little healthy competition between your team members. Kill Rate Identifying whether your team is closing more tickets than are being opened is crucial to ensure you’re not falling behind. HR Metrics for MSPs Revenue per Employee A powerful, but often overlooked metric, Revenue per Employee allows you to gauge how efficiently your company is using its employees. Employee Churn Rate Monitoring your employee churn rate can help you make better hiring decisions and highlight areas where you can improve your company’s culture. Employee Satisfaction Employee Satisfaction helps you understand how happy your employees are and by doing so will allow you to identify any potential problems. Employee Engagement Measuring employee engagement will allow you to identify how much effort your employees are willing to put towards the job and its responsibilities. Wow, that was a lot of metrics... Here’s the thing: these aren’t all of the metrics you could be using to improve your MSP. There are likely hundreds of metrics to choose from, and we know of at least 20 more that we’re willing to share. To get this entire list along with the 20 extra metrics in a handy PDF, you can quickly download here: As we mentioned at the beginning of this list, don’t think that you should be tracking all of these metrics at once. Instead, view this list as a resource for ideas when you need to improve a certain area of your business but don’t know exactly where to start.
Each December, our team likes to take a bit of time to reflect on our journey over the last 12 months. We talk about how our team has changed, how our product has changed, and which accomplishments we’re most excited about. In 2016, we added 8 new teammates and also announced quite a few major improvements to our product. In case you missed any of those product updates, here’s what you need to know about the 7 Most-Awesome Updates to BrightGauge: # 1. Achieve your Growth Goals with Scorecards Ever wish you had an easy, sure-fire way to hold your team accountable for their individual goals? How about a simple way to track your KPIs each week to make sure the company stays on track, rather than playing catch up later? Done and done. BrightGauge Scorecards are the easiest way to make sure you achieve your growth goals. Here’s how they work: by assigning a KPI to an owner you are holding them accountable to ensure the number meets the goal for the week. If the goal is met, it turns green and if not, it turns red. We have been using Scorecards at BrightGauge for quite some time and they have truly been a game changer. For those of you that follow Traction or Rockefeller Habits, this will save you TONS OF TIME! See what our CEO, Eric, has to say about the feature: # 2. QuickBooks Online Integration Our QBO integration gives you the ability to visualize and track your financial metrics in real time. You no longer need to wait for your P&L at the end of the month or spend hours creating a spreadsheet. When combined with any of our other integrations, you’re provided with a single view of the metrics you need to run your business. Learn more about QBO + BrightGauge. # 3. Datto Integration Ever wish you could seamlessly track your backups and manage the amount of data you are storing for your clients, in real time? Consider it done! Now it’s a breeze to track how much of each device is in use, how many devices are out of communication, and so much more. See what our customers think and learn more about Datto + BrightGauge # 4. Leaderboard Gauge with Team Photos It’s a proven fact that healthy competition helps companies significantly improve employee performance on routine tasks! That’s why we introduced the Leaderboard gauge as a way to rank your team’s performance and boost the competition. # 5. Rotating Dashboards With this new feature you can keep as many gauges as you need in sight. No more trying to squeeze as much as possible into one display… give your data the space it needs to shine! Learn more about rotating dashboards here. # 6. Technician Dashboards A great compliment to leaderboards, technician dashboards display the same metrics that a service manager would track, but are filtered to only include the data from a specific technician. See how easy it is to help focus your technician’s efforts on the right task at the right time! # 7. Client Dashboards Take your Client Reporting a step further with a dashboard that shows your clients the information they want, how they want it! With Client Dashboards your metrics can be shared in real time, providing the transparency that will help build trust and showcase the value your services provide. Learn more about Client Dashboards here. Now tell us, what was your favorite BrightGauge product update in 2016?
If you’re not surprised by these 3 facts, nothing will faze you: 80% of your future profits will come from your most loyal customers (about 20% of your customer base) An increase in customer retention of 10% increases the value of a company by 30%. Increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profit by as much as 95% Those facts, as reported in this CMO article, give you an idea of how powerful customer satisfaction (CSAT) is. In other words, CSAT data can help you grow exponentially, if you understand it and use it the right way. Everything needed to track CSAT is in Zendesk, and with a little tweaking, you can be improving your scores in no time. Here’s how to use Zendesk to track and improve CSAT: How to Enable Zendesk’s CSAT Feature Follow this guide to enable and customize Zendesk’s built in CSAT feature. You won’t be able to change the actual survey much, but that’s okay. Zendesk’s default survey has been well optimized and follows best practices. Their survey has an average open rate of 21%, which is great! Once you’ve enabled the feature, or if you already have it enabled, proceed on to the next step. How to Improve Your CSAT Score Understand the Purpose of CSAT One thing to always keep in mind is that CSAT is not about what you want to know. It’s about what your customer wants to share with you. In other words, CSAT is a feedback channel for your customers. The feedback you receive from them is important, and you should set aside time to review their comments regularly. Share Feedback with the Team At BrightGauge, we’ve got a channel in our team’s Slack messaging app, which we use to share customer feedback we’ve received. Sharing feedback has helped us see which features our customers get excited about, praise team members for great customer service, and understand what we could be doing better. It also provides a big increase in transparency. Here’s what it looks like: Your company can experience the same benefits by sharing customer feedback. If you are not sharing feedback yet, we highly recommend it. React Quickly We’re not talking about response times, although those are important too! We are referring to how soon you identify and respond to trends and changes in CSAT scores. Are your scores down after a change in procedures? Do you notice that a customer’s CSAT drops off after 6 months? These are the types of changes you should be able to identify. You need to be able to check your CSAT in real-time. You also need to be reviewing your data on at least a weekly basis, but preferably more often. Look for changes, trends, and exceptions when you're checking your data. Making decisions with these things in mind will result in an increase in service team efficiency and company success. Service Success with Zendesk and BrightGauge We mentioned how important it is to track your data in real-time, and there’s no better way to do that than with dashboards. Monitoring your data on dashboards allows you and your team to react faster to changes in your data. You can even look at historical data to identify and observe trends. With this, you can make proactive decisions and predict changes to workload like the number of tickets a new client will add. Displaying your information on dashboards around the office will improve your team’s performance. They’ll be able to look up and see where they stand in relation to company goals, increasing productivity, and how their individual contributions truly impact the business. One of the biggest benefits of using our integration is the ability to combine data from different data sources onto one dashboard. This gives you a full view of your business and enables you to make better decisions. It also helps you track how changes in support metrics impact other aspects of the business, such as churn. Check out our recent Zendesk integration announcement to learn more about how it can help you improve your service team. Bonus: Improve CSAT with Video Support One idea we’ve used to drastically improve customer satisfaction is to send video clips for responses in support. Kristian, our Customer Support Specialist, began including them in our support responses not too long ago. His reasoning was that he’s a visual learner and he believes most others are as well. Since implementing, we’ve consistently gotten feedback like this: And this: Video support was incredibly easy to implement and the results have been nothing short of fantastic. Read more about how Kristian revolutionized our approach here. Ready to learn more about about customer satisfaction? It all starts with making sure that you’re doing business with your ideal customers. Check out our free webinar featuring Richard Tubb, former MSP Owner turned Consultant:
Help us give a warm welcome to the newest member of our team, Ashley! The Early Days Ashley was born and raised in Miami, a very common trend among the BrightGauge crew! As it turns out Ashley attended the same local high school, Doral Academy, as three of our other teammates (Kristian, Stephen, and Felipe) before enrolling at Florida International University where she would earn her BA in Sociology/Anthropology with a minor in Asian Studies. After college, Ashley worked in a handful of other businesses focusing on administrative and bookkeeping work, which means that she brings a great deal of experience to our growing organization. First, she established herself at a local contemporary art gallery, Art Center South Florida, and then Ashley spent time with a family law office before accepting a role as Office Manager for an assisted living facility management company. Her next position was Senior Bookkeeper for her husband’s bookkeeping business, and the rest, as they say, is history because then Ashley heard about an opening at BrightGauge. Joining the BrightGauge Crew Ashley was first drawn to the BrightGauge team because we’re a family-owned company that places a ton of importance on maintaining a culture that emphasizes having fun, building an awesome product, and constant learning - while also making sure that our crew can easily balance work and personal time. She also loved the fact that we talk constantly about the importance of our customers and ways that we can help them succeed in their respective businesses by showing them the value of their data. When we asked Ashley what she’s most excited about when it comes to joining our ranks, she told us that she’s really looking forward to “helping streamline BrightGauge processes as the company grows.” She goes on to say “I want to support and keep the cogs turning here so that we can keep growing.” Outside the Office When she’s not helping us to stay organized and running smooth, Ashley enjoys reading, spoiling her dogs, going to concerts, and checking out new activities with her husband and friends such as operas, plays, musicals, museums, bars, breweries, wineries, and more. She also loves traveling, kayaking, going to Disney World, Japanese culture and learning the Japanese language. Join us in welcoming Ashley to the BrightGauge team!
Metrics are important at every level of a company, but nowhere else is this more apparent than in customer service. That’s why every support role should be constantly monitoring customer service metrics, whether that be in the form of a dashboard or a report. One of the most difficult parts of monitoring customer support data is knowing which metrics to monitor in the first place! To help you decide, here are the metrics that we track at BrightGauge: Customer Support Metrics for the Whole Team At our HQ, we’ve got some of our most important customer support metrics displayed on a wall-mounted dashboard. These metrics are more of an overview than a detailed look, and help to give team members an idea of their performance at a glance. We use: Open Tickets by Assignee - this helps create some healthy competition and give team members an idea of where they stand. Tickets by Week (Last 13 Weeks) - provides a historical context for data and helps to identify trends vs. isolated incidents. New Tickets - the biggest number on our dashboard, New Tickets provides a quick look at how many tickets have not yet been triaged. Open Tickets by Type - this number provides an at-a-glance look at both your customer support team’s performance and which types of tickets are being held up. Unsolved Tickets by Type - another metric to quickly gauge your performance and potential bottlenecks. Kill Rate - allows you to make sure you're at or near a 0 backlog (or the weeks where you're making up for down weeks). Having metrics for the whole team is great, and is definitely a necessity, but it doesn’t end there. You also need to get more detailed with metrics for your Team Manager and Reps. Customer Support Metrics for your Engineers Jessica, one of our Customer Support Specialists, monitors metrics on both a daily and a monthly basis. On a daily basis, she constantly keeps an eye on the New Tickets gauge while at her desk to track those that have yet to be acknowledged. In addition to that metric, she tracks the following metrics on a monthly basis: Number of Tickets Opened - provides quick insight into trends and allows prediction of ticket load next month. Number of Tickets Closed - provides quick insight into how the team is handling the ticket load and whether additional resources will be needed. Kill Rate (Closed/Opened) - a combination of the above gauges to provide even more insight into workload, resources and performance. Average Response Time - helps keep an eye on any SLAs and identify any potential bottlenecks. Average Customer Satisfaction - based on surveys, this gives insight into how pleased customers are with our service. Picking your Support Metrics Not every company or team is the same: you may be structured differently or be simply using different data sources. That’s why it’s important to choose which metrics are important at each level of your service team. You’ll know you got it right when you begin to see performance increases in the areas you’re tracking! Ready to learn more about how to improve your business with the right metrics? Download our free guide on Key Performance Indicators:
We talk a lot at BrightGauge about transparency, trust, and communication. Those principles are foundations for our own team and operations, but we also advise our customers about why they should adopt these 3 standards. At our sister company and MSP, Compuquip, we learned a lot about how far a business relationship can go when it’s built on trust, and we built that trust by offering our clients complete transparency through plenty of communication. How to be transparent with your clients To be truly transparent, you have to share everything with your clients. Think about it this way: once the contract is signed, your clients don’t consider all the work your team is doing day in and day out to make sure that everything is working properly. As a matter of fact, they probably only think about you when something isn’t working and they put in a ticket for your team to fix. That’s why you should be sending them a monthly summary of everything you do - tickets resolved, problems avoided by your constant monitoring, the number of hours you spent doing the work, and more. What you can achieve with monthly Client Reports Client reports serve two main purposes. First, a report is your chance to show each client how much value your work brings to their business. It’s an easy way to show them what you’ve accomplished for the month. Second, reports are the best way to show your clients where you dropped the ball and need to improve for next month. Wait, clients should see mistakes highlighted every month? Absolutely. We realized at Compuquip that by being open about our shortcomings, we had to immediately be prepared to explain what steps we would implement to make sure the same mistake wouldn’t happen again. What we realized during this process is that by being open and honest, our clients came to trust us more. They realized that we’re human, we’re all capable of missing the mark from time to time, and they liked to know that we already had a plan in place to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. How to get started with Client Reporting There are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to creating your client reports: Make sure your reports are being sent to the right people Include the right information in each report Send the reports at the right time Keep reports personalized for each client Next steps after client reporting Want to learn more about these 5 tips for getting started with Client Reporting? We’ve put together a free, 13-page guide on Best Practices of Client Reporting. Click here to download your copy:
