Scaling Your MSP Business: How to Improve Operational Efficiency

As a managed services provider (MSP), delivering top-notch service is critical to staying competitive in today’s rapidly evolving market. However, maintaining the same level of service and support can be challenging as your customer base grows. By scaling your operations and processes, you can ensure that all customers receive the same level of high-quality service they’ve come to expect.  

But where do you start when it comes to improving operational efficiencies? If you’re used to doing things manually, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Fortunately, products like AvePoint Elements are here to help.  

In this post, we’ll discuss how the Elements platform can scale operations and optimize processes in your MSP business to help you stay ahead of the competition.  

What is AvePoint Elements 

AvePoint Elements is a powerful, partner-centric solution that enables MSPs to manage multiple tenants in one place, driving operational efficiencies and enabling long-term success. Within the Portal, you can quickly onboard new customers, manage their licenses and services, and monitor for areas of improvement, all from a single, centralized location.  

One of the key benefits of Elements is that it automates many of your administrative tasks, streamlining processes and giving you more time to focus on building customer relationships and growing your revenue. And with Element’s detailed views for each customer, you’ll have complete visibility into each relationship, allowing you to easily identify any upsell opportunities.  

Elements was purpose-built to improve service delivery for MSPs. You can easily scale and expand your business’s service offerings.  

“The portal is incredibly valuable. We never have to log in to our customers’ environments to do the work we need to do. We spin up trials, onboard new clients, configure the service, manage licenses, access reports – all within the platform. It takes a lot of the load off us.”

– Loryan Strant, Product and Innovation Lead, Rapid Circle

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How AvePoint Elements Drives Operational Efficiency

While managing multiple tenants in one location is a great feature, there’s much more that Elements can do to help your business grow and succeed. With its built-in capabilities, as well as its integrations and APIs, Elements enables enhanced service delivery and seamless communication between your systems, making it easy to meet growing customer needs.  

Here are three ways that Elements helps you drive operational efficiency in your business:  

• Be a step ahead of customer needs  

The best way to streamline processes is to make your different systems communicate better. Integrating your existing systems, such as your billing or ticketing system, within Elements, and automating the processes, such as opening tickets or generating invoices, can drive these efficiencies. This not only saves time but also reduces errors and delayed support.  

For example, you can integrate your PSA (ex: ServiceNow, Autotask, etc.) with Elements APIs. If a customer job fails, Elements could automatically open a ticket through API programming and send it to the Helpdesk to correct. With an integration like this, you can build a proactive service approach, without manual effort or cost, and avoid the dreaded customer comment, “I think something is wrong,” without you knowing about it first.   

• Check performance status at-a-glance 

When you only have a few clients, it’s easy to check that your services are performing as they should by logging in to each customer instance and reviewing the latest jobs. However, with multiple clients, especially using multiple products from multiple vendors, this can be time-consuming and not frequent enough to catch failures before a customer notices. With Elements built-in capabilities, MSPs can view dashboards for things like all client environments, specific service modules, or even specific customers for an at-a-glance view of service performance.  

If you want to take this a step further, you can leverage an Elements API to extract information to display in your own internal systems and dashboards. For example, you can use Elements newest API for Cloud Backup (available for Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace) to export information about backup jobs, like size of backup data or the number of backup files, from Elements and import it into your own central reporting dashboard, which may include job information across all products your client uses. This makes it easy for you to confirm everything is working as it should for each client.  

Get Started: How to Grow Your Business with a Cloud Backup & Restore Practice

• Build tailored customer reports    

Beyond collecting information about jobs, Elements APIs allow you to access important data and insights. Traditionally, this may have required you to query each incident of each service for each customer and aggregate all the information. With Elements APIs, you can pull this raw aggregate data across multiple customers easily to create your custom reports; we give you the data – you do with it what you want. 

For example, customers value the opportunity to see what their money is going towards, and offering reports on services is an easy way to do this. While you can create out-of-the-box reports within the Elements Report Center, you may want to create tailored reports with multiple services including if you work with multiple vendors. With the Cloud Backup API, you can pull raw data to generate one consolidated report, displaying the data however you see fit.  

Overall, AvePoint Elements and its APIs and integrations are essential tools for MSPs to scale their business and meet customer demands. With more APIs and integrations coming with every product release, Elements is a robust product that can help future-proof your MSP business and take it to the next level. 

Get Started with AvePoint Partner Program  

Elements is just one of many services and solutions AvePoint offers to help MSPs drive operational efficiencies and grow their business. Our solution suite includes an array of robust technologies – from access monitoring to provisioning and migration technologies – that help you build a business around securely managing your customers’ collaboration ecosystems. Start fueling your business growth by becoming an AvePoint partner today.   

Ready for more tips on how to drive efficiencies in your management processes? Get our free guide – Maximizing Your SaaS Potential – to discover better multi-SaaS management practices.