Prove your Worth with Branded System Reports
It’s a sad irony of providing IT support that the better you do your job, the more invisible you become. You probably have all kinds of software tools at your fingertips. Many help you to be more proactive and spot impending issues early before they cause problems for users. Great though this is, it can lead those users to assume your company does little to justify its monthly fee.
It’s a sad irony of providing IT support that the better you do your job, the more invisible you become.
You probably have all kinds of software tools at your fingertips. Many help you to be more proactive and spot impending issues early before they cause problems for users. Great though this is, it can lead those users to assume your company does little to justify its monthly fee.
Clearly, this is not a great state of affairs. You need to do something to make sure the powers-that-be appreciate all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes. The answer is to provide your customers with regular branded system reports.
What to Tell your Customers
If you think about all of the day-to-day tasks that keep systems running, there’s actually plenty you can report back on. Here are just a few examples:
- Internet security scans and their outcomes.
- Bandwidth usage.
- Network inventory changes.
- Software updates.
- Helpdesk calls and the steps taken to resolve them.
Ideally, you need to be sending your customers a detailed report on these issues on a monthly, weekly or perhaps even daily basis.
Thankfully, producing these reports doesn’t have to mean lots of manual data collation and document production—there’s software out there that can pull all this information together for you.
Remote Management and Monitoring (RMM)
Report production is an integral part of many remote management and monitoring (RMM) solutions. Some of these are cloud-based and extremely simple to set up, simply requiring a small “agent” program to run on every monitored machine.
All you need to do is configure the reporting system to produce the reports you wish to send to your customers. You then add branding and logos and any explanatory text you feel is necessary to explain the reports (probably to a less technical target audience).
For extra impact, it can make sense to include details of helpdesk calls and system issues, along with the work that was done to resolve them.
Even if the customer contacts you send the report to fail to read it, or simply glance through, the fact they receive this report on a consistent basis acts as a constant reminder of the work you are doing on the IT infrastructure.
Extra Benefits
Submitting branded system reports isn’t just about justifying your fees. Reports can be used to highlight current or future system issues such as virus attacks, disk space problems or bandwidth bottlenecks.
This provides you with an opportunity to use the reports to justify system enhancements, including spend on new hardware and its implementation. As well as justifying your fees, you can make the case for additional business, too.
If you don’t already provide branded system reports, perhaps it’s time to increase your visibility and, in turn, boost your revenue.
The GFI MAX Remote Monitoring and Management tool offers branded systems reports along with many other great features to help MSPs grow. If you would like to find out more about how GFI MAX RemoteManagement can help you offer the best quality service for your customer, why not sign up for a free trial?
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