3 Reasons You Should Choose an IT Documentation Service for MSPs

To be effective, managed services providers (MSPs) need to be everywhere at once. From fielding customer requests to onboarding new business, you and your technicians have your hands full when it comes to meeting the needs of your digitally driven customers. Meeting these needs successfully requires more than just a commitment to these customers—it calls for investing in and strategically deploying tools designed to help your team do their best work.

This is easier said than done with regards to one key tenet of MSP operations—IT documentation and document management. IT documentation enables technicians to pool their institutional knowledge and resolve customer issues based on a shared info base. This information is pulled from data and past tech experiences with similar problems. Without a proper IT document management system, employees are left reinventing the wheel every time they grapple with a client request—which decreases efficiency and adds costs.

Avoiding this outcome is a clear and urgent need for MSPs. With research showing that 47% of global knowledge workers see corporate amnesia as an issue at their organization, and 29% of an average workday is spent looking for the right information, it’s fitting to say that companies need better IT documentation and document management to succeed. To keep customers satisfied, MSPs need to be the ones to provide these documentation capabilities, especially as their customers rely on them for a growing host of IT needs.

The right document automation service could benefit MSPs and allow them to better support their customers. With a streamlined document management platform that features automated documentation capabilities, you and your team of IT experts can engage more confidently with customer requests and deliver an overall higher quality of service to the organizations that depend on you.

Streamlined onboarding and training

Whether you’re onboarding a new customer or training a new IT technician, building new relationships and transferring knowledge can be challenging for MSPs. This is particularly important when it comes to building institutional knowledge. As we’ll discuss in greater detail in this article, it’s crucial to ensure that knowledge is stored and shared somewhere other than with your individual technicians.

With a documentation automation service, MSPs can avoid this problem from the beginning of their working relationship with new customers. Automating the documentation process means capturing every aspect of new customers’ IT infrastructure. This helps make sure your team understands exactly what they’re working with, what the standard operating procedures should be, and what to do in the event a customer requests support.

This automatic information capture and subsequent documentation can be a value add, especially when it comes to training new IT professionals. Developing a working understanding of your customers’ networks can be challenging. Without this level of documentation, it can be daunting for new technicians to absorb all the relevant information and teach themselves what they need to know. Mapping out workflows and recording key IT configurations can help recently hired tech talent get up and running as soon as possible, without requiring too much valuable time and attention.

Optimized institutional knowledge

By investing in your IT documentation process with a document automation service, you can leverage your institutional knowledge and streamline services for your customers. With proper documentation, you can help guarantee that your techs resolve customer requests in a consistent way, resulting in a more standardized, understandable workflow across your organization.

Automating and recording IT information is also essential when it comes to preserving client relationships. While it may be easy to rely on certain technicians to handle certain client needs, too much of this can concentrate institutional knowledge in just a few IT professionals. If one of your techs leaves without having time to train other talent, you could be caught in an embarrassing situation with customers, and forced to start from scratch handling their IT infrastructure. IT documentation is critically important when it comes to ensuring continuity between the IT experts on your team and preventing your customers from experiencing a gap in service.

Improved quality of service

Through automated documentation, MSPs can capture and record critical aspects of their customers’ IT environments. While this degree of detail is useful in terms of business continuity, it’s also practical for everyday work. This accessible information will be an asset for the techs tasked with fielding customer requests and resolving their issues as effectively as possible—with as little hand-holding as possible.

For example, rather than starting from a blank slate for every customer request, a secure documentation process that’s been automated and streamlined from the get-go helps provide a clear roadmap for how to approach common issues. This can range from listing out what steps techs have taken in the past to recording key configurations across an IT environment. IT professionals can then check current configurations against previous ones to get to the bottom of problems quickly and confidently.

In this way, regularly updated and effectively automated IT documentation can help MSPs deliver higher quality service to their customers. Equipped with better information, backed by past experience and documented customer specifications, your team will be able to more easily resolve issues, saving both you and your customers’ resources and time.

Tried-and-tested documentation automation

Making documentation automation work for your MSP depends on investing in the right tools to get the job done. With N‑able^® Passportal, you can leverage a secure password and IT documentation manager to automate key parts of your working relationship with clients. Backed by cloud computing, Passportal streamlines the process of automating workflows and makes it easier for IT experts to monitor credentials, documents, domains, licenses, warranty expirations, and more.

By opting for a cross-platform password manager and documentation solution, MSPs can boost their operational security, empower their IT experts to respond to customer requests promptly, and ensure the continuity of crucial institutional knowledge. With Passportal, you can make life easier for your team and ensure that your customers are getting the highest possible quality of support from your business.