How one MSP used ConnectWise to reduce expense & expand service

Teamspring

Georgia-based technology solution provider Teamspring focuses on adding value to their clients’ IT support experience by doing more than just supporting systems. By offering an education layer to their services, they help clients better leverage technology for growth.

Challenge

Teamspring’s client base was growing, but their business management tools weren’t keeping up. The two-person team needed a better way to manage their 520+ endpoints.

Solution

ConnectWise solutions have freed up enough of Teamspring’s time that they can focus on education for their clients, efficiency for their team, and a better bottom line for the company.

Results

ConnectWise Manage™ and ConnectWise Automate™ have streamlined Teamspring’s processes, allowing them to increase ticket close rates and pull in 80% margins.

“You are leaving money on the table if you aren’t using ConnectWise Manage.”

- JAMES SANFORD, Founder, Teamspring

Saving time, adding value

So how do they manage to provide exceptional IT service to a large SMB client base and find the time to provide in-person trainings and seminars with a team of two? With help from ConnectWise.

James Sanford, founder of Teamspring, shares how they decided to partner with ConnectWise on their business journey: “I started the company, a typical managed service provider, in 1999.” James helped create Blue Martini software before going full time on TeamSpring in 2006. Starting out with Kaseya and Autotask onboard, he got a taste for what automation could do to help his billing and support, so when ConnectWise Automate (LabTech at the time) came along, he saw a serious opportunity to keep benefitting from automation with “a lot more capabilities for scripting and monitoring at a fraction of the cost.” According to Sanford, it just made good business sense.

Making the move

Making the move to a new set of solutions can seem daunting, but partnering with ConnectWise Automate and, later, ConnectWise Manage gave James and his one employee the power to reduce stress, work directly with clients, and maintain their expert-level service delivery. “The more time I spend on ConnectWise, the fewer people I have to hire,” James shared, and efficiency gains mean he’s down to less than 15 reactive tickets every week, with the rest of the time spent on proactively solving problems.

Surprisingly simple

Once Teamspring made the decision to move to ConnectWise Manage, James was ready for a change. “I was more than ready to move away from Autotask. As a product, it had stagnated.” ConnectWise Manage, on the other hand, exceeded expectations and the onboarding process, according to James, “was so incredible in terms of coaching me through what other people do to be successful. The training tools are amazing.” This smooth transition put Teamspring on the right path to significant results.

With ConnectWise Manage, James can deliver invoices quickly, see the details of financials, and tie everything easily into QuickBooks for invoicing. Autotask wasn’t up for the challenge of tracking tickets and wait times, or for translating and billing for agreements in QuickBooks, but new releases in ConnectWise gave him everything he needed plus special invoicing functions that came directly from requests in the forums. “That feedback process on what’s important to technology solution providers is a big differentiator,” James shared.

Improving service with automation

With the automation ConnectWise brings into Teamspring’s day-to-day, average ticket close times are down to less than an hour. More than that, ConnectWise Automate gives Teamspring the ability to do more than ever when it comes to proactive service delivery.

When a client using Webroot unintentionally downloaded a superfluous antivirus program, ConnectWise Automate allowed the team to stop the second program before it caused an issue, then gave them the power to blacklist the program on other users’ machines so that anyone else who made the same misstep would automatically raise an alert in the system. If an issue impacts more than two machines, James writes a script to resolve it.

With ConnectWise Automate, the team is better prepared to get ahead of potential issues before they cause problems for end users. With so much automation on hand, Teamspring can monitor for everything and make fixes happen faster.

Tremendous gains

In addition to allowing Teamspring to manage more than 520 endpoints with just two people, ConnectWise Manage and ConnectWise Automate give them even greater efficiencies. Built-in functions inside make it easier for users to submit issues to the team, which means James doesn’t have to hire a full-time person to answer the phone.

“You can eliminate a lot of talk time and fix the issues faster—which is what our clients want—thanks to ConnectWise. Users can right-click on an agent and create a ticket right from the machine, and even attach a screenshot of the problem.” Just like that, the issue creates a ticket and gets them into the queue without a single phone call.

And with the routing capabilities in the two tightly synched solutions, the team of two can manage every ticket from five distinct boards instead of struggling under a constant onslaught of incoming tickets. High-level issues go straight to high-visibility boards, while lower-priority alerts can be routed to other boards to be reviewed or handled as needed.

ConnectWise is also saving James time when it comes to onboarding. “We can drag a new machine into a group and the monthly billing is automatically adjusted.” Kaseya and Autotask kept the team having to manually update every new machine, add it to the plan, and adjust the agreement. “With ConnectWise, we save a lot of time. The time we used to take to reconcile between billing and deployment is completely automated, so we can focus on higher priority tickets.”

Reinvesting recovered time, resources

Is ConnectWise the right set of solutions for Teamspring? The numbers speak for themselves. With only an operations manager and business owner on staff, Teamspring has doubled their number of agents from 250 to 520 (and growing), and increased their margins to 80%. Not only that, but they’re providing higher quality service.

“Because we’re so efficient, I can go on site, talk to the business owner, and build the relationship. I can look for opportunities to offer more support.” If time is money, Teamspring has hit the business solutions jackpot with ConnectWise.