Grow your MSP business without straining your staff

Our previous blog {LINK} explained how managing Microsoft Teams for enterprise clients can be a powerful way to grow your MSP business and boost managed service revenues. But seizing that opportunity requires capacity. For MSPs with tight margins and already maxed-out support analysts, delivering enhanced, high-value Teams services may seem out of reach. The key is to establish ways of working that optimize your staffs’ time while minimizing the effort they have to put in so your services can be as profitable as possible. And that is within reach. 

Know what’s holding your MSP business back 

First it’s important to diagnose where efficiency typically gets compromised with Teams monitoring and management. There are a few common obstacles: 

Narrow visibility. MSPs that rely exclusively on native Microsoft tools can see only the parts of the Teams environment that Microsoft touches directly. That leaves out any intermediate ISP networks and the client’s local network, which just happen to be where the majority of problems occur: poor Teams performance is often tied to ISP issues, VPN bottlenecks and local network congestion. Lacking visibility into those issues can rob your staff of valuable time as they try to isolate problems and pin down root causes.

Poor coordination. Delays can be compounded when you depend on inputs from other parties — such as your client’s network engineering, security and endpoint teams — who tend to work in silos and likely have other priorities to deal with. 

No ownership of the issue. Even when you can determine where an issue originates, whether in the network infrastructure, at an endpoint, or out of Teams itself, it can be hard to trigger action. ISPs are often slow to escalate and validate issues with their support teams — and quick to point fingers at other providers to shift blame. Microsoft also takes time to announce outages and to troubleshoot any tickets you may happen to open with them. 

Lack of a big picture. Being unable to identify trends or recurring patterns can doom your team to face the same problems on repeat. With native Microsoft tools, data is uncorrelated and, since most Microsoft Teams go unreported by users, relying on tickets alone means the data may not be there at all. What’s needed is good monitoring data such as telemetry, logs or user reports that show performance by location, device, time, error message and the like. 

These impediments to efficiency understandably make it risky to offer enhanced Teams services: quality could suffer and your technicians could burn out. Fortunately, with three essential capabilities you can overcome them all and successfully grow your MSP business. 

Three Teams ‘must-haves’ for your MSP business 

To ensure maximum efficiency and minimum burden while delivering consistently high value to your clients, you need the following: 

Network path tracing and root cause analysis. End-to-end network path tracing across the whole Microsoft Teams environment lets you see exactly where issues are happening — and why — so you can lock in on root causes and fix them faster. That includes identifying and evaluating latency, jitter, packet loss, wifi strength and other performance issues wherever they may be occurring. Complete path tracing also provides undeniable diagnostic evidence that ISPs and other third parties can’t dodge when the problem lies with them.

Automation. To keep burden off your team, it’s critical to automate as much as you can. Capabilities like synthetic testing streamline operations and allow you to adopt a proactive management approach by identifying and resolving issues before they become user-affecting. Automating data collection and correlation will give you a much fuller and clearer picture of what’s happening in the Teams environment at a glance. 

Correlated analytics and visual dashboards. Putting all available data in front of your analysts in a single console with dashboards that make key metrics pop provides big-picture information to reveal and respond to trends, and to prioritize issues effectively across clients because you know which truly matter most. 

All these must-haves are built into Martello’s Vantage DX — the only solution created specifically for managing Microsoft Teams. If you’d like to learn more about how Vantage DX can help optimize your MSP business with strong margins and efficient operations, check out our MSP blueprint series below. Want to book some time now to meet? Let’s Talk. 

Blueprint 1: Launch compelling managed Microsoft Teams services

Blueprint 2: Optimize your Microsoft Teams services for peak profitability