OnPage Guide: How To Handle After Hours Support For MSPs

While after-hours support might be seen as overkill, you can’t live without it either. As soon as you remove it from your quote, you increase the chance of losing the deal. As such, after-hours service is a fact of life for most MSPs. While not the most pleasant aspect of the job, there are ways to make after-hours servicing a more profitable and organized enterprise. With more businesses demanding support 24×7, MSPs who don’t offer after-hours service are at a serious disadvantage.

This point is reiterated when reviewing how to implement after-hours support alerting for MSPs that use ConnectWise. These MSPs also get after-hours alerts but these alerts are in the form of tickets. How can tickets be turned into after-hours support vehicles?

This blog aims to explain how MSPs can both improve their offering and ease the pain of after-hours support service by:

• Suggesting changes to workflow
• Indicating how to rework your policy to suit your team
• Providing ConnectWise tips that help you manage the incident

After Hours Support Tip 1: RETHINK YOUR AFTER-HOURS POLICY

Typically, labor covered under a managed service agreement (MSA) extends from 8AM to 5PM Monday through Friday. Labor that is conducted beyond the hours specified under an MSA can be billed at 1.5-times the regular rate if it is performed after 5PM or weekend hours.
Implementing a policy like this ensures fewer emergency after-hours calls from clients and forces them to consider whether an emergency is really worth the extra cost. This leaves you and your team only having to handle real problems after-hours. At the same time the extra money earned needs to go to the one handling the after-hours emergency as an incentive.

After Hours Support Tip 2: FINE TUNE YOUR AFTER-HOURS ALERTING

Now that you are charging more for after-hours service you need to be responsive to your customers and make sure the incident is resolved in a timely manner. Using e-mail and texts for automatically generated alerts has been a widely used practice since the early 90’s, but it is not an effective and efficient way of receiving alerts. Alert notifications are a crucial part of effective RMM management and missing even one single email or text can result in delayed incident resolution.
Texts are subject to the availability of solid network coverage and e-mails sent out by ConnectWise could end up in the recipient’s junk box or get buried under other e-mails. Both these methods are unreliable in the context of getting an urgent alert to the person(s) responsible for resolving the incident.

To learn how ConnectWise can be used to run after hours support download our White Paper:

onpage.com/connectwise-tips-after-hours-support-for-msps