More customers without a proportional increase in administration | Service Automation Suite for MSPs

More customers without a proportional increase in administration: the challenge for MSPs

Growth is good news for an MSP. More customers, more services and more recurring revenue. But growth also has its downside: every new customer brings new users, systems, processes and exceptions with it.

If the number of customers increases by 20 per cent, you'd rather not see the administration workload increase by 20 per cent too.

Yet that happens in practice easily. Not because there's insufficient automation, but because automation is set up anew for each customer.

Each customer is just slightly different

A new customer has its own IT landscape. A different HR solution, different onboarding agreements, specific applications, or a different way of requesting rights.

The first reaction is often practical: we adapt the process for this customer. That adds an extra script, exception, or manual step. The same happens with the next customer.

Over time, the MSP manages not just dozens of customers, but dozens of variations of processes that are largely the same at base. This makes growth increasingly labour-intensive.

Automating is not the same as scalable working

MSPs typically automate a lot. That is not necessarily where the biggest gains lie. The real question is how that automation is organised.

Suppose onboarding has been automated for twenty customers. If each customer has its own set of scripts and logic, changes may also need to be reviewed and tested twenty times.

A change in a backend system can suddenly have ripple effects across multiple customer environments. Administrators must know which customer uses which variant and where exceptions have been added. The processes are automated, but the management of them still scales insufficiently.

Standardise where possible

Scalability therefore requires a balance between standardisation and customer-specific configuration. Not every customer needs to use the exact same process. Organisations differ too much for that. But many process steps are indeed comparable.

Think about user creation, access provisioning, control execution, change processing, or handling of offboarding.

By building those processes from a recognisable base, an MSP does not have to start from scratch each time. Exceptions remain possible, but become truly exceptions rather than the standard workflow.

Central orchestration over multiple customer processes

Within the Service Automation Suite platform an MSP can automate and orchestrate processes from a central approach.

It's not about building as many isolated connections as possible. The value lies in orchestrating control over processes that touch multiple systems and customer environments. Automatic actions, human tasks and exceptions can become part of the same process. At the same time, visibility into which steps are executed and where attention is required remains clear.

This makes it easier to repeat, manage and controlledly evolve processes.

Growth without knowledge becoming a bottleneck

Scalability has another side: people.

When each customer environment is set up differently, specialist customer knowledge quickly emerges. Administrator A knows exactly how customer X works, and administrator B knows all the exceptions for customer Y.

This makes planning harder and increases dependence on individual staff members.

More standardisation and central process control make knowledge more transferable. Administrators need to remember fewer exceptions and gain better insight into how processes are structured. Thus, growth is not only technically, but also organisationally, better managed.

How much extra administration does the next customer require?

That is ultimately an interesting question for every MSP.

If ten new customers also require almost ten times the same extra administration effort, there's little scalability benefit.

Automation must ensure that service delivery can grow without human resources, operational load and complexity growing at the same rate. For that, more is needed than simply automating individual tasks.

Scalable growth requires standardisation where possible, flexibility where necessary, and overall orchestration.

How scalable are your current processes?

With a Service Automation Suite Assessment we can identify which recurring processes demand a lot of administration, where customer-specific exceptions arise, and which processes are suitable for further standardisation and orchestration.

This provides insight into where Service Automation Suite can help service delivery grow further without administration load automatically increasing.

Discover how scalable your processes are

Do you want to know which processes demand a lot of administration and where standardisation is possible? Leave your details below. With a Service Automation Suite Assessment, we map out opportunities to work smarter and grow further without administration load increasing proportionally.

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