MSP's As NOC's, Handling Multiple Clients

Investment in Incident Management platforms is on the rise among leading MSPs, to facilitate seamless service delivery and enhance customer experience. Such a platform streamlines Incident Response, improves service reliability, and enhances communication among teams. It helps MSPs in reducing Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) incidents, thereby minimizing downtime and service disruptions. 

In this blog, we’ll cover what are MSP’s, what services they manage, and how they can handle multiple clients by using Squadcast.

What are Managed Service Providers?

Managed Service providers (MSPs) are trusted partners that provide a comprehensive suite of IT services, including IT infrastructure management, Network security, Cloud computing, Data backup and disaster recovery, help desk and technical support. Businesses can gain access to a team of experienced IT professionals by outsourcing their IT needs to an MSP.

What can MSPs manage?

Managed service providers (MSPs) can be a valuable asset to businesses of all sizes, providing a wide range of IT services. Let’s see who can benefit from them:

1. NOCs: Centralized Network Management

NOCs are the heart of network management, responsible for monitoring, maintenance, and performance optimization. MSPs offer NOC services, handling network monitoring, issue resolution, and performance enhancements. Clients benefit from expert network management while focusing on their core business.

Explore more: What are Network Operation Centers (NOC) and how do NOC teams work?

2. SOCs: Robust Cybersecurity

MSPs can extend services to Security Operations Centers (SOCs), addressing security threats. SOC services cover threat detection, Incident Response, and vulnerability management, ensuring client data and systems remain secure.

3. Software and Application Management

MSPs take charge of software and application management, including installation, configuration, maintenance, troubleshooting, and license management. Clients enjoy a well-maintained software environment with minimal effort.

4. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) Services

BCDR services ensure client resilience against disruptions. MSPs design and implement BCDR strategies, encompassing data backup, disaster recovery planning, and continuity testing.

5. Third-Party Services Management

MSPs efficiently manage third-party services and vendors, optimizing contracts and service performance. This includes cloud services, telecommunications, and equipment vendors.

6. Network Analysis and Reporting

MSPs provide clients with regular network health reports, including performance metrics, security insights, and improvement recommendations.

To ensure seamless delivery of these services, having a robust Incident Management and Response platform is essential. Let’s explore how Squadcast as a reliability workflow platform can significantly benefit MSPs in streamlining their operations and enhancing client satisfaction.

Why should MSPs use Squadcast?

Squadcast handles the way MSPs handle and resolve incidents across their client base. Here’s how:

• Increased Collaboration And Communication: MSPs can enhance collaboration and communication for their teams with real-time Incident Response, efficient alert routing, and seamless ChatOps integration with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. 
• Improved Incident Response Times: With a centralized incident management, real-time collaboration tools like incident-specific chat rooms (Gmeet, Zoom, etc.), conference calls, and incident notes MSPs can quickly resolve incidents and minimize downtime for their customers. Automated workflows, assigning incidents, past incidents and generating runbooks can  free up their time to focus on resolving incidents.
• Smart & Efficient Incident Handling: Squadcast's Deduplication, Suppression, and Escalation Rules help to ensure that only the most important alerts are routed to the right people. With Incident List View MSPs can get a bird's-eye view of all the incidents their team has encountered which can later help them create incident analytics inspired client based reports. 
• Reduced Costs: Squadcast offers MSPs a single platform for managing all aspects of Incident Response, including monitoring, alerting, collaboration, and reporting. Hence, eliminating the need to purchase and maintain multiple tools. It’s a cost-effective solution for managing multiple teams with customizable roles and permissions. Check our pricing here for better comparison.

How Can MSPs Leverage Squadcast to Manage Multiple Clients?

Squadcast addresses the challenging needs of MSPs through its comprehensive feature set. In addition to enabling the prompt detection of critical incidents with notification management and global team coordination via round-robin escalation, there are several features tailor-made for MSPs. 

These include Teams, Squads, Webforms, and Stakeholder Licenses, etc. Let's go over each of them individually:

Using Teams & Squad Roles 

Teams in Squadcast allow organizations to represent their internal operational structure effectively. This feature enables companies to manage and address issues within their distinct operational units, whether divided by technical specializations, activities, services, geography, or a combination of these factors. 

By creating separate Teams for each client, MSPs ensure that their data remains isolated and incidents are handled independently. Team members can be added or removed easily too. Each Team can have its own 

• Escalation Policies, 
• Services, 
• Dedicated incident dashboards, and 
• Distinct analytics sections.

Additionally, they can have role based access control over different team members giving them limited abilities of configuration or add them just as an observer.

The hierarchy can be further divided into Squads to represent distinct teams or sub-organizations within the main account. This prevents the need for maintaining multiple accounts, streamlining management and collaboration. MSPs can align their Squads with different customer segments, or assign each customer to a specific Squad based on the history of alerts and past incidents. 

Improving Customer Support with Webforms

Squadcast webforms offer organizations the capability to create and publish web-based forms that are accessible to both customers (or external stakeholders) and internal stakeholders for reporting incidents. When managing multiple clients, MSPs may occasionally overlook incidents or not receive immediate alerts regarding them. In such scenarios, MSPs have the option to host public webforms or create dedicated webforms for each client.

How does this feature benefit MSPs? 

Individuals from the MSP's client list who identify an issue can conveniently complete the webform, which will trigger the automatic escalation of the issue to the responsible personnel. This streamlines the process, eliminating the need for clients to contact the customer support team and subsequently identify the most suitable person for issue resolution. 

Webforms are also highly adaptable, enabling MSP’s to tailor them to their branding with company logos and additional input fields for detailed issue descriptions. Hence, giving MSP’s the ability to gather crucial contextual information from customers. By including specific fields in the webform, such as severity, priority, service affected, and description, MSPs can gain a deeper understanding of the reported issues. The submitted form creates an incident in Squadcast, which then follows the established escalation policy, ensuring swift routing to the subject matter expert. 

Moreover, webforms establish a direct line of communication via email for clients, keeping them informed about incident status.

Reporting method via webform streamlines issue resolution, minimizes disruption to engineers' & On-Call members workflow, and offers a controlled and spam-free way for clients to communicate their concerns. 

Utilize Stakeholder Licenses 

MSPs can leverage Stakeholder licenses in Squadcast to provide their clients with access to the Squadcast platform without having to purchase their own licenses. This can be a valuable way for MSPs to differentiate themselves from their competitors and provide their clients with additional value. 

There are two stakeholders in Squadcast, namely internal stakeholders and external stakeholders. The internal stakeholders are the individuals from the MSP itself. They could be the CTO, CEO, etc. The external stakeholders are the multiple clients that MSPs are handling. 

For Internal Stakeholders MSPs can:

1. Notify stakeholders precisely by @mentioning them in the incident-specific chat room, supplemented by Email and Push notifications.
2. Designate stakeholders as watchers to receive updates on incident status, comments, actions, and more, ensuring comprehensive information sharing.
3. Sustain an exclusive internal status page with real-time updates on critical incidents. Internal stakeholders receive automatic email notifications for any status page updates.

For External Stakeholders, they can:

1. Establish a public status page for external stakeholders and customers. They can also be subscribed. For more information check our Status Page support doc. 
2. Enable subscription-based email notifications for incident updates, fostering trust, transparency, and reducing support queries.

The Stakeholders feature is universally accessible across all plans, offering read-only access to all incidents generated in Squadcast. As a result, Stakeholders do not receive default notifications for any of the incidents initiated in Squadcast. 

Squadcast provides the option of acquiring unlimited Stakeholder licenses at a cost of $21. For more information check Squadcast pricing details.

Through prompt stakeholder notifications, MSPs can furnish their clients with critical information, enabling them to make well-informed decisions concerning their managed services.

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Conclusion

Squadcast can help MSPs to manage their downtime and outages by providing them with a centralized view of all of their incidents, timely stakeholder notifications, multi-tenant support and customizable webforms with the ability to communicate with clients about the incident status.

Organizations often depend on MSPs, who can, in turn, trust Squadcast for efficient incident response and management across multiple clients. To witness the tangible benefits, check out this case study about Resolve Technology. They improved their MTTA and MTTR by 30% by leveraging Squadcast's Automatic Escalation Policies, Postmortem, and Status Page features to enhance their Incident Response process.

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Squadcast is an Incident Management tool that’s purpose-built for SRE. Get rid of unwanted alerts, receive relevant notifications and integrate with popular ChatOps tools. Work in collaboration using virtual incident war rooms and use automation to eliminate toil.