Speed Up 10 Common Help Desk Tasks Using Nerdio

MSPs always look for ways to improve efficiencies at the help desk. Trimming down the time it takes to close a client ticket while delivering great customer service is key to overall profitability and customer success.

Below are the some of the tasks that just simply eat up valuable time and prevent your engineers from moving on to the next ticket or helping another client. If any of these instances seem familiar, it’s time for you to go “Nerdio”!

1. A corrupt Windows profile

Sometimes a corrupt Windows profile is just unavoidable. You get a call along the lines of “I can’t log in, it says I have a temporary profile, and none of my icons are there.”

SIGH… Somehow the PC magically got dropped off the domain or the PC can’t authenticate. Once you realize it’s a corrupt profile, you can find the issue and fix it, then proceed to let the user log in again, However, if that doesn’t work, you must wipe out the profile completely and remove or rename it from the C:\Users folder before the end-user can login again.

Usually this process happens several times before the issue is resolved. What’s the cost? Probably two hours of time wasted. Not only your engineer’s time but during that time your client wasn’t able to use that desktop.

Average time to close a ticket of this type: 2 hours

2. End-user onboarding

Suppose your client tells you they are growing and have just hired a new employee. Naturally, you’re happy for them and if they’re growing, it also means you just grew by one endpoint. Assume this new employee will be sitting at a desk with an existing computer.

The task of onboarding a new employee could be one that takes a long time. Every client has different needs thus a different process. You log into your domain controller, open Active Directory, add their username and set up a password.

Hopefully, you have AD Connect available so it just syncs the new account to Office 365. You log into Office 365 and create the same account there. Come back down to the File Server, make sure this user is in the correct security groups, and make sure their mapped drives show up. How about printers – you need to make sure they have their printers all loaded up.

Now their applications need to be loaded and all the correct file paths are pointed to the right place. Then you open Outlook and make sure Office 365 is activated and email caching can begin. Depending on how many lines of business applications this user needs, it can take some time.

Average time to close a ticket of this type: 30 minutes to 1 hour

3. End-user offboarding

You get the call just before 5 p.m. on a Friday. “Michelle is moving to Florida, her last day is today. Make sure we delete her account but save her emails and files, please make sure Samantha (her manager) has access to those files as well.”

You scramble to find the customer’s offboarding documentation. It says to back up her Office 365 emails, save her desktop files, document files, maybe she has some things in OneDrive, save that too, reset her account password, disable her access and put her in the ex-employees OU group. Save her emails? Do they want that in an exported PST?

Average time to close a ticket of this type: 30 minutes – 2 hours

4. Replacing an end-user

In this scenario, not only are you technically off-boarding an employee but you’re also onboarding an employee and setting up a new desktop. Go ahead and crack open that documentation again. Follow it line by line till you get to the end: that is if you have one for replacing an employee. This one goes a little something like this. “Hey, so Andy is leaving the company on Friday, but John is joining on Monday to take over his role. Make sure John has everything Andy has.”

You’ll most likely start by deleting the account from AD and Office 365, exporting the emails somehow or creating a shared mailbox. Adding the new user in AD and in Office 365. Log on as the new user on the local PC, copy all the files over, etc. Log in to Outlook, make sure Andy’s old email pops up. Then you must make sure all the mapped drives are set up, printers are set as defaults, then maybe you’re done.

Average time to close a ticket of this type: 30 minutes – 2 hours

5. Setting up a new desktop

Your customer buys a new PC from you. You order it from distribution, it takes a couple of days to come into the shop. It will likely go through your staging process where you unbox the PC, update everything to the latest firmware, re-image the computer to your default base image. Install your clients LOB applications, perform all your Windows updates before it gets boxed back up again, to be brought onsite or shipped out.

Then you’ll schedule someone to install the PC onsite, connect it to the network jack, join it to the domain, then begin setting up the end-user.

If the client has a lot of complex apps to get installed, be prepared to spend all day completing the installation and migrating files to the new PC. Wait — did five people suddenly get new PCs? DOHH!

Average time to close a ticket of this type: 3 – 8 hours

6. Slow user experience

The complaint is very common: “My computer is slow today; it was running great a week ago.” You open your RMM solution and remote into the customer’s session. You ask them to show you what they mean by its “acting slow”. You follow a trailing mouse as the customer demonstrates the slowness.

At this point, it’s a subjective thing to determine if something is really running slow or if the user is just anxious. You run some malware scans, maybe schedule a full AV scan after business hours and tweak a few settings. This first round of fixes may or may not solve the problem. You give it a few days and try to get the ticket closed. Was the client really satisfied? It is sometimes hard to tell. You might follow up once a day until they tell you that its better.

Average time to close a ticket of this type: 1 hour to 3 days

7. Scheduling a task to be done later

Even though it tends to be stressful when something comes in as an emergency, it can also be difficult when the opposite occurs. Frequently, a ticket can be generated for a task that needs to be done at some point in the future. For example, “we’re hiring a new person in our marketing department in two weeks, or please reboot the app server hours at 3 a.m. tomorrow night.” You open a ticket and assign it to an engineer hoping that they will remember to do that task on time. The ticket remains open till the task is complete.

Average time to close a ticket of this type: 15 minutes to days

8. File level restores/disaster recovery

Suppose a client loses a file or accidentally deletes it. They call requesting that you restore it. Hopefully, you have a robust backup solution in place, so a file restoration can be painless. You go to your third-party backup solution (hopefully you’re no longer using tape), find the file, find the right version of it, restore it to a new location, call the customer and have them verify to see if the right one has been restored. Sometimes it can take several tries before getting to the right file. In some cases, the end-user leaves work before you get the file back, and it gets pushed till next day.

A fire strikes your client’s office, everything is gone. The Operations team has everyone working from home. If you have properly prepared, your data is safe in the cloud. What if the cloud fails? Highly unlikely but no worries there either. Your data is backed up to multiple regions, but how fast does your current BDR solution get you back up and running? Your engineers are essentially in emergency mode trying to figure out how to best support your client in this time of need.

Average time to close a ticket of this type: 15 minutes to days

9. Opening/closing support tickets

Opening and closing tickets doesn’t take a long time but multiply that by the amount of calls and emails that come in throughout the day — it adds up. Let’s say the average time it takes to open a support ticket, understand the customer’s issue and put it all in a support ticket is seven minutes. Multiply that by 50 tickets a day, that’s 5.8 hours per day just for opening tickets. Closing each ticket is about the same, maybe a little less as all you need to do is type up a solution and click it closed.

Average time consumed by MSP: 5.8 hours a day opening (50) tickets; 4.1 hours closing tickets

10. Billing reconciliation

Billing reconciliation isn’t a help desk task but often supports folks will get involved. When an engineer at the help desk adds a new O365 account, how do they communicate that with billing and operations? Do they have to open a separate internal ticket? What if they forget? We all know buying through a distributor’s CSP program means that you get a bill one month in arrears, sometimes even two months.

How do you shore up the licenses consumed on a month-to-month offering? What if an end-user employee leaves your client but the client never lets you know? Then when they get the bill, they expect you to credit them a license you’ve already paid for? Days can be wasted sorting all this stuff out.

Average time consumed by MSP: A few days per month can be dedicated to license reconciliation.

Other Quick-to-Resolve but Tedious Tasks:

1. Password resets – end-user forgets a password. You have to reset them in multiple spots.
2. Stuck in an RDS or Citrix session – end-user gets stuck in RDS/Citrix login and the system boots them off.
3. Managing groups and distribution lists – add/move/changes to security groups and distribution lists.

How Nerdio Will Make Your Life Easier

Imagine what it would be like if each one of these tasks took just a few minutes each. I’m happy to say that at Nerdio, there’s built-in automation for every single one of these time-draining tasks. How many more clients would each member of your team be able to service and service quickly? Would your clients be more satisfied?

The key to having a successful MSP IT practice is not about having your clients use your unlimited support services. And, it’s not about you showing them the value they are receiving from all of your hours of service. It’s about what you can do to prevent them from calling in the first place. The best experience your client can have is to have no issues at all!

Here at Nerdio, we’ve invested a lot of energy into automating each and every one of these tasks I mentioned above, allowing your team to perform these tasks in “3-clicks or less”. Over the course of a year, Nerdio can save the average MSP hundreds of hours. Now you can use that time to focus on growing your business.

Schedule a personalized demo with one of our Nerdio for Azure MSP experts today to discover how we can elevate your game!