Introduction
Managed service providers (MSPs) are no longer considered solely as vendors delivering IT services. However, more modern roles have recently emerged as critical to running a lean and productive IT company.
MSP employees behave as strategic partners who execute, automate secure and scale IT infrastructure and operations. This is so that CIOs and the internal IT team can focus on the differentiating work that helps businesses succeed in the digital economy.
With the majority of administration and other tasks on their plate, MSP employees need to streamline and automate their systems, saving themselves and other members hours of manual labor. The best way to go about it is to document their internal and external processes to further build a robust knowledge framework.
What role do MSP employees play in your business?
Statista predicts that the global managed services market was valued at 161.37 billion U.S. dollars in 2021. And it’s expected to exceed 300 billion U.S. dollars by 2027. The reason behind that is MSPs are considered experts in their field.
A skilled MSP employee can cut down inefficient procedures and provide uniformity across departments and roles. They can also act as a consolidated hub for managing contingent labor. Establishing clear communication routes and eliminating costly inefficiencies is their main purpose.
These employees work in the background to ensure that most firms' day-to-day operations run smoothly. They frequently work with small and medium-sized enterprises that lack the resources to hire their own IT staff yet require competent help. They can also be useful for larger businesses that outsource their IT responsibilities.
Aside from that, they provide a combination of on-site and remote assistance and a variety of service level agreements (SLAs) to satisfy the individual demands of their clients. They can help organizations compete globally by delivering services that increase efficiency, lower costs and allow the business to focus on its core competencies.
To ensure that MSPs follow best practices, documentation is needed to help your internal team overcome knowledge gaps. All in all, without MSP employees, it’d be difficult to build a solid knowledge framework that your organization could use for the years to come.
How does documentation benefit MSP employees? Why is it necessary?
According to a 2020 Forrester report commissioned by Adobe, 97 percent of firms had no or few digital document processes, while 72 percent used a combination of paper-based and digital procedures.
In general, the more information you document, the more effective your MSP employee will be. For this reason, a ton of MSPs are resorting to documentation software solutions to help them maximize the amount and quality of documentation they produce. Because it’s not always possible to document everything, understanding where to begin is essential.
Internal documentation and external documentation are the two main types of information that an MSP should document. It’s useful to keep each category separate from the others to discover the information you need when you need it.
Internal documentation refers to the documents that your employees need to fulfill activities that are directly related to your business. External, or customer-specific documentation, includes all documents required for servicing your customers, ranging from broad information about the customer to specifics about the processes your MSP has previously conducted for them.
Proper documentation enables any MSP employee to give a complete, all-encompassing degree of assistance. There are more benefits to it than that:
- Saves time needed for knowledge transfer: As an MSP company and its operations expand, so does its storage of reports, spreadsheets, forms and data, most of which is customer documentation. This might complicate how processes are being done over time. To ensure that each step is repeated efficiently, MSP documentation is key in getting those processes standardized. So that next time, employees can recreate the same outcome.
- Cuts down inefficiencies and errors: Let’s say you’ve onboarded a new employee. With training, you’re able to make them understand the extent of their responsibilities. However, they still might not get a hold of it, which can create inefficiencies in your system. Documentation saves you time and cuts down the possibility of errors occurring even during more complex processes. At that point, even the newest member of your staff can have a far higher success rate.
- Lowers training costs: Building on the previous example, having a new team member means you’ve to start from scratch. Best-in-class MSPs use solid documentation to save training time, cut expenses and make the onboarding process seamless, easy and efficient. Documentation is the key to success for new recruits and your firm. Step-by-step procedures help your new employees get up to speed faster and boost your chances of retaining them.
- Allows for a better customer experience: Having documentation means you don’t have to stress and look for the correct information. You can just get whatever you need to and spend less time searching when time is of the essence. This saves you time and embarrassment as well as reflects your involvement in the client and fosters trust. The more people trust you, the more chances that they’ll do business with you.
Good documentation provides numerous benefits to your firm; these are only the tip of the iceberg. The more you improve your documentation utilization, the more benefits your MSP employees will receive. You can enhance the productivity, accessibility and security of your information by using a smart MSP tool like Scribe. It is an easy-to-use software to document all your procedures and allows you to personalize access for your employees.
How MSP employees can create documentation using Scribe? How does it benefit them?
The manner in which your MSP keeps documents has a direct impact on their ease of access, management, sharing and coordination. However, if you're an MSP employee or manager, you'll probably need to introduce Scribe into your workflow.
Scribe can help create how-to guides regarding the infrastructure they support; substantially shorten the time it takes to handle client IT issues and increase support quality by developing repeatable practices.
Here’s a great example of what your MSP document can look like. On top of that, you can customize the Scribe to ensure your employees know how to create a custom task rule in Asana:
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The increase in speed, consistency and efficiency translates into a better client experience – which is the ultimate goal of an MSP, right?
Apart from that, you can use Scribe to make MSP documentation templates, a starting point for employees to standardize processes. It can also ensure that team members adhere to a consistent format and structure, ensuring your workflow is moving ahead as it should.
But that’s not all. There’s a lot more that Scribe can help with when creating MSP documentation:
- Cuts down documentation time: Scribe can now record your mouse movements and keyboard inputs besides screen recording. This way, you can quickly write in-depth documentation for your projects while you work. On top of that, you can collect screenshots using its Chrome extension or other similar browser extensions to add to your document.
- Improves team productivity and efficiency: With the time saved by using Scribe, you can establish improved SLAs with confidence that they’ll be met consistently. Documentation cuts down service delays, allowing you to be available to all of your customers when they need you. Following this, it’ll be clear that your service is superior to your competitors.
- Streamline documentation process: Employees better understand their daily tasks and expectations when processes are streamlined. Scribe removes inefficiencies from the current process so that employees can focus more on the quality of their output.
- Include visual assets within documentation: With an interactive step-by-step procedure, it helps you identify the tasks and how to complete them to offer the best outcome. Scribe saves teams an impressive 20+ hours per month compared to other traditional forms of tutorials. You may create documents by adding Scribes, videos, texts, lists and other tools, with its Pages features. By connecting relevant Pages and Scribes, teams may get a clearer picture of what they should focus on, from a personal or business perspective.
- Easily customizable: Scribe is easily modifiable, allowing you to go into further detail with each step. You can also edit screenshots to remove sensitive information, add text and annotations and your branding. With its pre-made templates, it’s easy to create your own documentation without it seeming like generic information.
- Simple to embed and share anywhere: Scribe allows you to sync between platforms to provide information to anybody you choose. You can also integrate your documentation onto any knowledge base or CMS platform, making it more actionable for you. You'll be more productive in no time because it allows you to pass on information and duties to the right individual for the job. And yes, that’s in real-time!
- Helps keep documentation up-to-date: Not every process remains the same in an organization. So it's critical to assess your documentation on a regular basis and make changes as needed — along with implementing version control. As your firm grows, so should the nature of your documentation requirements. If your current document is no longer meeting your needs, it may be time to reconsider. With Scribe, you can easily update your documentation whenever you feel like it.
- Helps collaborate with the team easily: All modern firms operate inside an ecosystem of customers, team members and external support. Without the capacity to quickly pass on and work on information, inefficiency and friction are unavoidable. Using Scribe, you can track activities performed along. On top of that, you can easily export the file into any format – be it PDF, copied onto a document, or so on.
- Allows secure transfer of information: Not every employee in the company requires access to every document. Your documents might contain sensitive information and should be kept confidential. Using Scribe, you can limit and manage access for different team members, allowing only a few individuals to read, edit and share based on their roles.
Documenting the stages of processes is quite a manual task and can take hours. Begin by analyzing your company's documentation requirements and then select software that connects with other tools, allows customization and matches with employees' needs and preferences.
Scribe helps you optimize resources and increase productivity, improving cross-functional communication and eventually increasing the company's top and bottom lines. It speeds up the production of MSP documentation and allows you to be productive in your day-to-day responsibilities.
Start using Scribe to document your MSP processes today
With today’s business environment and the growing use of technological solutions, MSP employees face complex processes. This worsens when more and more data are available, along with the daily hustle and bustle.
To make their lives easier, MSP managers and staff can save time and effort by adopting Scribe to streamline their documentation process. Scribe can also help managers enhance team productivity and efficiency.
We’re not exaggerating at all. Scribe can be your no.1 documentation tool. Here’s one of our trusted users testifying that:
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You see, companies waste a significant amount of time and resources modifying older document versions instead of making comprehensive, optimized digital document workflows. With Scribe, that’s not an issue either.
To learn more about how Scribe can benefit your MSP team, visit our website and try Scribe for free today.
