Top 10 MSP Tools to win in the Cloud

July 19, 2017

As a managed service provider, your clients count on you to maintain a high level of organization within your company. A single failure can cost your customers time and money. To reduce the chances of such occurrences, MSP can utilize cloud tools. There are several reasons why cloud-hosted solutions are a better fit in today’s […]

As a managed service provider, your clients count on you to maintain a high level of organization within your company. A single failure can cost your customers time and money. To reduce the chances of such occurrences, MSP can utilize cloud tools. There are several reasons why cloud-hosted solutions are a better fit in today’s enterprise environment. From business continuity to disaster recovery, cloud tools will help drive efficiency for service providers. Cloud based MSP tools can streamline and automate operations like messaging, task management, customer relationship management and other day to day tasks. Below are cloud tools MSP’s can use to streamline their environment.

Task Management Tools

Its easy for an MSP to be overwhelmed by whats on their plate. In order to respond in an effective manner to anything that comes their way, it is critically important that they properly manage tasks. Keep the team of IT specialists productive and focused on client priorities with cloud-based task management platforms, ideal for remote collaboration.
Asana
Asana is among the favored project management tools available. It seamlessly combines elements of collaboration, file storage, and project management to help manage tasks across a team.
Bitrix24
Bitrix24 takes a more holistic approach by offering a complete suite of management, communication and collaboration tools for the team.

Internal Communication

Proper communication within a team is the only way to guarantee that it will remain a cohesive and productive unit. With cloud based collaboration tools, MSPs can ensure team members remain connected whether they are at the office, on-site with a customer, or on the road for conferences and trade-shows.
Slack
Slack provides real-time messaging, search and archiving for modern teams. Its the ideal tool to make office communication efficient, organized and to the point.
HipChat
HipChat offers native video chat and powerful integrations with a host of other apps such as Asana, Zendesk, Google for work and Atlassian products.

Customer Relationship Management

For managed service providers, its all about the customer. This makes customer relations one of the most crucial aspects of a business. Having a centralized customer management solution makes it easier to maintain impeccable levels of customer service and satisfaction.
Salesforce
By storing information about your clients and interactions with them, receiving notifications and tracking deals, Salesforce CRM enables MSPs to track each client touch-point from the initial outreach to on-boarding to after-sales support to customer satisfaction engagement.
Insightly
Insightly has a modern user-interface, powerful integration, and a generous free plan that is geared towards smaller businesses.

Remote Monitoring

Monitoring their clients environments remotely allows MSPs to spot potential issues and respond swiftly before a ticket is even filed.
BMC TrueSight Pulse
TrueSight offers real-time visibility into the server and cloud infrastructure of your customers. It also provides notifications and alters on infrastructure and application metrics per second.
LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor provides a single intuitive dashboard to monitor all websites, networks, servers and devices. The architecture is easy to setup within a clients IT environment.

Customer Service and Support Management

It is the responsibility of the manged service provider to ensure that customers receive all the support they need. Proper support goes a long way in building customer loyalty, which is priceless to a business. A lot of resources are required to provide high quality customer service. Cloud based tools can help fill that gap.
Zendesk
Zendesk allows MSPs to track, prioritize and solve customer support tickets. Their product suite has been developed to make businesses more scalable, reliable and flexible.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is built for companies of all sizes. It is currently used by over 80,000 businesses all over the globe to handle service-level-agreements, ticketing and other support issues.

There are several other cloud tools in each category that MSP’s can use to grow their business. The time and money spent finding the right tools will be worth it in the long run because they will help streamline processes within the company and put you on the path towards success in the cloud.

Author: Gabriel Lando
Image courtesy of sirirakphotos at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

By Team FileCloud