MSPmentor

During a typical month, roughly 120 managed services providers (MSPs) embrace LabTech Software, a remote monitoring and management (RMM) software platform. So how does LabTech plan to scale its customer support as it onboards more MSPs? Michael Johnson, manager of professional services at LabTech, offers some insights.

First, a little background: LabTech shifted into growth mode in early 2010, when ConnectWise Capital invested in the company. In an email a few weeks ago, LabTech CEO Matt Nachtrab mentioned to me that the company is onboarding about 120 MSPs per month — or roughly 1,400 companies per year. It got me thinking: How is LabTech scaling support to meet the influx of new MSPs as customers?

Enter Michael Johnson, LabTech’s manager of professional services. Johnson said the LabTech support team was established in Florida in February 2010. The company has screened roughly 1,800 candidates and hired 28 support engineers who each carry a minimum of seven years managed services experience. “This holds true to our philosophy that we are you — the MSP,” Johnson said.

Johnson pointed out that “LabTech is a graphical user interface for the most part; and a myriad of Windows’ embedded commands. When our partners experience an issue there is generally a complex, highly sensitive, and highly technical, underlying reason. Therefore, having a strong system administrator background is truly essential to the timely and successful diagnosis of critical issues.”

Johnson concedes that building team with mostly level 3 engineers has taken some time, but he says LabTech now has a full complement of staff to assist partners. Support operations run from 12:00 a.m. Sunday right through to 8:00 p.m. on Friday, with an emergency escalation procedure on weekends. (Side note: I need to check if those times are U.S. eastern time zone). LabTech is managing roughly 2,500 support tickets each month, and 83.9 percent of the issues are resolved within the first 48 hours.

Next Moves

Johnson and his team continue to review LabTech’s approach to support. Among the forthcoming changes: Within the next 30 days or so, LabTech plans to remove an external call center used for inbound telephone support. Instead, LabTech will offer an in-house immediate contact, “which will only further improve our partner support,” said Johnson.

Sometime in August, LabTech will implement an ATLAS program (I need to get more details on this…), and the company will publish support metrics on its website. The published metrics will include average survey response, response times, average ticket resolution times, and more.

In his conclusion, Johnson offered up his direct contact info to partners — 813.397.4623 or MJohnson [at] LabTechSoftware [dot] com.

Bigger Picture

Going forward, MSPmentor plans to take a closer look at MSP software companies’ service and support strategies. Overall, MSPmentor needs to give managed services providers a better feel for the types of phone support, online support, and service level agreements that software companies offer their MSP partners worldwide. The article above is the start of that process; we look forward to sharing more support insights with our readers in the days and weeks ahead.

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