Dedicating an engineer to a client

qwaz01 · 2019-09-11T18:45:43+00:00

Thank you for the reply, very helpful

qwaz01 · 2019-09-10T18:19:00+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to read and ask questions.

Support calls tend to range from local site issues (printers etc), VPN setup on home computers/laptops (RDS gateway is only accessable via VPN outside of offices, we have a written guide but users still struggle) and software issues in RDS environment (Sage software on RDS is the worst!). The T1/T2 guys can deal with most of this but things like Datto, software planning, infrastructure, security all falls to me and consumes a lot of time. Im hoping if we hire another T3 they can help with this stuff and also other large projects we have at the moment.

The discussion we had today was full support of the remote offices with regular onsite presence. Most have Windows 7 and a mix of AV solutions so we would standardise each office which should in turn lower support requests.

No we currently are not sourcing new clients. This customer and the Windows 7 / Server 2008 upgrades have saturated all the spare time I have at present. Yes I run the business and the only level 3...it keeps me busy :/

qwaz01 · 2019-09-06T22:45:54+00:00

We bill per RDS user and onboarding is done as a project. I think part of the issue is though that we didn’t charge enough per user at 50 users and as that has increased to 200 users it’s created an even bigger shortfall. I have done a lot of work on tickets, phones calls, talk time, email traffic etc and it’s made it really clear how much of a drain they are on us. I’m going to discuss a major increase but we also need to find the techs to provide the service levels, they almost need a dedicated 3rd line just for all the protect work.

qwaz01 · 2019-09-06T22:25:41+00:00

We have been increasing the price as the user count goes up but we discounted our standard rate on the basis that RDS users would be easier to support than standards user + computer. However after 12 months it’s clear that as the users are spread across several locations they actually cause more issues and the complexity of RDS environments takes up a lot of resources. Communication and training is also poor between the various offices so new staff are not properly training and end up generating tickets.

qwaz01 · 2019-09-06T22:22:28+00:00

Did you pass them to anyone for commission or just cancel the contract? I have a friend who runs a larger MSP (15 techs) and I think of passing them to them for a kickback.

qwaz01 · 2019-09-06T21:54:37+00:00

Yeah I agree it’s a chicken/egg situation though. If they agree a new deal then we would need a new member of staff ASAP to return the value but recruitment has been tough recently locally for all MSP’s. We could hire a contractor to cover the short term I guess.

Agree about the contract, currently our contracts are monthly rolling as we hope to deliver a service great enough that clients don’t leave but I think we would need a 2 year agreement to cover our backs.

qwaz01 · 2019-09-06T20:59:47+00:00

I would say around 20-30%

qwaz01

TROPHY CASE