Time to Resolution - 7 Ways to Improve This Critical Metric

Time to resolution is a critical customer service metric for MSPs that’s inextricably linked with customer satisfaction. Finding ways to reduce your MSP's average resolution time will invariably boost customer loyalty and increase the chances of clients recommending your services.

Keeping your resolution time down is largely a matter of training your help desk technicians and giving them the right tools to manage their communication and workflows. Look for ways to streamline your service workflow to cut the average time required for resolution and improve the customer experience.

1. Make the Most of the Onboarding Process

The onboarding phase is a critical step for your MSP in setting up a successful relationship with each client. A comprehensive onboarding process (see our MSP onboarding checklist for tips) allows you to equip users with the knowledge and skills they need to navigate your systems seamlessly without needing to contact your service team for help at every turn.

Doing the groundwork at this stage will put your clients in good stead to self-serve by equipping them with easy access to the information and tools they need to troubleshoot common problems. This results in fewer inquiries for your service team, giving them more time to handle important issues that come in.

Ultimately, the more work you put into your onboarding process, the fewer problems you'll face down the line. Offer extensive guidance including interactive walkthroughs and tooltips to provide contextual and practical documentation on how to get the most out of your services.

2. Be Proactive in Offering Help

Taking a proactive approach to customer service means you reach out to your clients before they realize they need help. This cuts resolution time as you can anticipate potential issues before they become a problem that needs to be solved. It's also a huge plus for your relationship with your client as they'll feel seen and valued.

You can make technical assistance more proactive by analyzing your clients' feature usage. This helps you understand user behavior and foresee problems before they occur. Tag certain features that could be stumbling blocks and track users' interaction with them. Take it as a cue to offer help when you detect a pattern of low usage or user abandonment.

3. Use the Most Efficient Communication Channels

Making communication as easy as possible is key to resolving problems efficiently. Integrating Thread is the best way for MSPs to offer their clients a streamlined and efficient line of communication with MSP technicians. Thread connects businesses with their MSP via the chat software the business already uses.

Our cutting-edge solution reduces communication breakdowns by offering the most direct way to get clients the help they need. This includes:

• Automatically triaging problems: Our chatbot automatically establishes the nature of each issue before assigning it to a technician. This ensures that each issue is assigned to the technician who is best suited to the job. This prevents endless back and forth as the technician can start resolving the client’s problem right away. 
• Prioritizing urgent requests with Magic AI:Magic AI flags the most urgent service requests and sends them to the head of the queue to ensure issues that could stall operations are resolved swiftly.
• Replacing an inefficient ticketing system with threads: Thread automatically assigns each job or “thread” to the right technician, reducing downtime.

Time to resolution is one of the key MSP KPIs to track and measure performance. Reducing time to resolution by optimizing communication channels will improve customer satisfaction and boost the likelihood that clients will stay loyal over time.

4. Create a Knowledge Base

Create a comprehensive knowledge base that can be navigated quickly, using a platform like IT Glue or Hudu. This empowers your clients to solve problems on their own in just a few clicks. Your knowledge base should build on the skills you developed with your clients during the onboarding process. Start by providing solutions to the most common queries and repetitive tasks your clients undertake.

Doing this unlocks the ability to surface the right information, in the right channel, at the right time via solutions like Magic Agents. This enables your clients to troubleshoot technical issues even outside of business hours and frees up your technical team to focus on more complex or pressing issues.

Tip: Train a GPT to document in your voice automatically. This is just one way that you can use AI tools for IT support.

5. Use Passive Surveys for Instant Feedback Submission

Passive surveys are useful for collecting instant feedback from users without disrupting their flow. Their objective is to capture problems as soon as customers face them, giving the MSP critical insights into each feature’s functionality. It also helps you identify problems that could be solved before they impact customers. 

Passive surveys are a great way of reducing help tickets for your support team. This frees up technicians to face other issues as they come through.

6. Identify and Eliminate Points of Friction

Clients can find moving between touchpoints within their IT system frustrating if their progression isn't seamless. 

1. Perform an engagement funnel analysis by mapping out touchpoints.
2. Track user progression from one touchpoint to the next. This analysis allows you to spot potential points of friction that users may find challenging.
3. Improve or eliminate these friction points before clients encounter a problem and contact you to solve it, or have systems in place to resolve these issues quickly.

7. Track Customer Interactions to Identify Trends

Understanding user behavior is essential to creating experiences that meet your clients’ needs. Tracking how clients interact with your systems is a key part of this as each customer interaction gives you insights into how your MSP can improve the customer journey and lower service requests.

A useful analysis should give you the answers to the following questions:

• Which lodgment methods are used most (chat, phone, email, portal)?
• Which services are most popular?
• Which of your MSP's teams are least engaged with?

You can track customer interactions by tagging certain features or creating custom events. Data collected from a specific period can then be analyzed to identify trends that your customer support agents need to know. 

Remember that the fewer service requests your technicians receive, the faster they can resolve the most pressing and complex queries. Proactively looking for potential problems and solving them before they grow is therefore key to lowering your time to resolution.

How to Calculate Average Resolution Time

Use this formula to calculate your support team’s average resolution time. This is the same formula that measures average resolution time in a customer service team. 

1. Note the amount of time that elapsed between the initial inquiry and the final resolution for each request over a given period. 
2. Use this data to calculate the total resolution time for that period. 
3. Divide this by the number of customer issues resolved in the same period to find your average resolution time.

Formula:

Average Resolution Time = Total Resolution Time / Number of Resolved Requests

The Importance of Reducing Time to Resolution

A 2024 paper by Dr. Marcin Majka suggests that the significance of resolution time lies in the impact it has on customer experience and offers insight into the efficiency of a business’s customer service operation. Swift problem resolution doesn’t only solve problems in the moment; it also builds customer trust and loyalty and enhances businesses’ reputations through positive word-of-mouth and online customer reviews.

Causes of a High Resolution Time and How to Solve Them

Customers expect their problems to be solved within a few hours to optimize productivity. Review your processes and adopt solutions to slash your resolution times.

Cut Resolution times with Effective Systems

Reducing resolution time is a vital way to meet or exceed customer expectations and fulfill your Service Level Agreement. Providing resources to help clients troubleshoot their own problems, using chat-based communication channels, and implementing an automated triage system are effective ways to cut down resolution times.

Despite rapid technological progression over the past decades, many MSPs' approach to service requests hasn't kept pace. Replace antiquated ticketing systems with a streamlined and highly efficient solution that reduces your time to resolution and ensures service magic for your clients every time.