As a managed service provider, regularly monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial to understanding the health and performance of your business. Without knowing how your MSP stands in real time, you run the risk of SLA failure and losing out on business from existing and potential clients. Complete visibility is the goal, and solutions are available to help you gain the insight you need in order to address pain points and ensure your operations are as smooth as butter.

Here are the top insights that you should be regularly monitoring in order to ensure your business remains on track and continually attracts new clients and retains and delights existing ones.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential metrics that help an organization measure its performance relative to set objectives. Regularly monitoring KPIs helps to track progress and highlight areas that require improvement.

For MSPs, tracking KPIs is particularly important as it gives a comprehensive overview of the health and performance of the business. By utilizing KPIs, MSP owners can make informed decisions based on data and measure progress toward established goals.

Notable KPIs that MSPs should keep an eye on are the customer satisfaction rate and the average time to resolve tickets. These KPIs provide valuable insights into the quality of services offered and the efficiency of your engineers. By tracking KPIs over time, you can detect trends and make informed decisions for the betterment of your business. For instance, if the customer satisfaction rate decreases, you, as an MSP owner, can identify areas that need improvement and implement changes to better meet customer expectations.

Customer Satisfaction

Client satisfaction is crucial for the success of MSPs as it directly impacts your bottom line. A satisfied customer base is more likely to remain loyal, renew their contracts, and recommend your MSP to others, leading to increased revenue and growth. Unsatisfied customers, on the other hand, can harm your MSP's reputation and move on to competitors instead.

Measuring customer satisfaction can be achieved through various methods. One option is to simply survey your customer base regularly to understand how happy they are with your services. If any problems arise, you can resolve them before they decide to cancel their contract.

You can keep your customer satisfaction high by maintaining high-quality services. This starts with closing tickets in a timely manner with the right solutions and being responsive and engaged with clients during their time under contract.

Average Ticket Time

The average time amount of time it takes to close out a ticket is a key metric for managed service providers (MSPs). Keeping an eye on this is crucial as it provides a clear picture of the performance and efficiency of the support team and the quality of your organization’s customer service. One helpful way to monitor average ticket time is by using a PSA. These tools allow MSP managers to track the progress of support tickets in real-time, helping them make informed decisions on how to optimize support processes.

Reducing average ticket time helps streamline your operations and protect your bottom line. By using automated tools such as canned responses, establishing a knowledge management system for techs, and providing engineers with training and development opportunities, you can ensure your average time remains low.

This will help your team meet SLAs and keep clients happy on a daily basis.

Knowing When You’re Near SLA Failure

Service level agreements play a vital role in the success of MSPs as they set expectations for the level of service and support clients receive. Falling short on SLAs can result in unhappy clients and lost business, a nightmare scenario that every MSP manager looks to avoid. When establishing new partnerships, it’s best to carefully set SLAs that are achievable and realistic to prevent potential failures. Over time, take opportunities to regularly review and update SLAs in order to keep them relevant and accurate.

Knowing your SLAs and tracking metrics against them is the best way to ensure SLA compliance and prevent failure.

For many MSP managers, this can be a manual and tedious task. However, some PSAs do offer the ability to monitor SLAs in real time. This helps identify any potential problems early on, allowing for quick corrective action to be taken and ensuring client satisfaction and retention.

Gain Better Insight Into Your MSP With Zest

Understanding and tracking KPIs is vital for the success of your MSP. These metrics, such as customer satisfaction and average ticket time, provide valuable insights into the health and performance of your business, allowing you as an MSP owner to make informed decisions for improvement. Meeting SLAs and retaining clients is the end result of retaining strong oversight over your day-to-day performance. Many MSPs rely on PSAs to help track these metrics, but not all of them are created equal.

Enter Zest. Unlike other PSA software, Zest gives you complete visibility of your business. With its unique dashbar, Zest allows you to easily track your performance at all times and address any problem areas before you hit SLA failure. You’ll have insight into all the relevant KPIs that support your day-to-day operations and bottom-line performance in a secure, easy-to-use interface. You no longer have to rely on manual tracking or inputting metrics yourself. Zest takes care of that for you. Try Zest today.