The BrightGauge Blog

Dispatch data for amazing service delivery One of the keys to a high-performance help desk is managing the flow of tickets through the service queue. The quality of your service as an IT provider will often be judged not by if you can fix the issue, but the experience that the user has while you do your magic on the back end. Think about the last time you went out for a nice dinner. I’m sure the food was great - that’s why you choose a place with great reviews and a high price tag. So what differentiates fine dining from casual dining? It’s often the experience. Consider the user experience for your clients when they open a support ticket. Is it the equivalent of a casual diner or fine dining? BrightGauge can help ensure the client experience is managed like a 5-star restaurant, differentiating you from other IT providers that are simply providing a sandwich shop experience. Dispatch Role The first point of contact for your clients is usually managed by a dispatcher. I personally don’t support the idea of a pure dispatcher role like some in the industry advocate for. I find this is often an administrative crutch that is put in place to compensate for staff not being accountable for the ticket queues. Instead, the dispatcher role can simply be a designated role that is shared amongst the Tier 1 staff of the helpdesk. Each day or each week a person is designated as the dispatcher and they are responsible for ensuring that tickets get managed according to the expectations of the users and the IT provider. The dispatcher role as a shared responsibility does two things: 1. Helps everyone respect the role a little more When a single person is a dispatcher, especially a non-technical person, the techs have a habit of not respecting the direction of the dispatcher. This is cultural and can be changed, but it’s a persistent hurdle for implementing this role. If everyone does this role from time to time, they are likely to respect the direction of others that they view as peers, especially if they are going to be asking for similar things on a different day. 2. Avoids administrative waste Why have a non-technical dispatcher that can’t pitch in and help the team with tickets when it gets busy? A pure dispatcher role is a consideration when the scale of the team is so large that it becomes a full-time role. Properly structuring your tiers and distributing the dispatcher role within the technical team is far more cost-effective. Even if you have a team of 20 people, this still works. Dispatch Board The first two boards that I build for my clients in BrightGauge are the service manager board and the dispatch board. The dispatch board is a fantastic way for the person doing dispatch to have a 500-foot view of the ticket queue. The dashboard helps the person see the exceptions and can act quickly on those exceptions. Managing by exception is a key methodology for working with a high volume of information. Asking a person to know the status and juggle 100 tickets a day is a recipe for burnout. Humans are good at keeping 5-8 points of information in their heads. Here is an example of a dispatch board. There is a rule in the LEAN methodology that dashboards should follow the five-second rule. Meaning you should be able to glance at the dashboard and be able to understand it in five seconds. Less is more with dashboards. A great way to make the dashboards more readable in BrightGauge is to use size and color-coding. You’ll notice in the example dashboard graphic above the numbers on the left are black. This indicates that they are informational. The colored gauges moving to the right are coded to indicate the severity of their compliance with expectations. In this example dispatch board we have 6 gauges that are color-coded to manage the ticket queue and service the client experience. Unassigned/New Industry best in class response time to new tickets is 15 minutes, but 30 minutes is acceptable if you’re just getting started. Therefore, this number needs to be either 0 or 1. When the number is 0 the gauge is green. Once there is a new ticket, someone needs to respond immediately to acknowledge the ticket and set an expectation with the user of when that ticket will be scheduled. To be very clear, acknowledgment is NOT the autoresponder from the PSA. It is contact either via email or phone from a tier 1 resource or the dispatcher. Actioning the tickets immediately when they come in should help ensure the acknowledgment time stays under 30 minutes and users are given clear expectations about when they will get support. In the restaurant experience imagine this as how long it takes for you to wait at the door before you’re greeted. Nicer restaurants will have a greeter there all the time welcoming guests and setting expectations for when they will be seated. Even in a standard restaurant where you seat yourself, if a server doesn’t come by to welcome you and get you a water within 20 minutes, you would justifiably be annoyed with the experience. Stale A stale ticket means that it has not been touched for more than 3 days. The importance of this gauge is to ensure that there are no tickets left behind. Like the unassigned gauge, stale should be kept to zero. No tickets should go stale if they are assigned to a technician's queue. They should have a routine of touching each ticket every few days to reset expectations with the user about what is being done to resolve the issue. Nothing drives people crazier than to have their support ticket disappear into a black hole. If the technician is waiting on the user, they should be following up via email and phone calls to try to contact the user. This process can largely be automated by your PSA as well to take the load off the tech. If the tech is waiting for a 3rd party vendor or someone else, they should still be updating the user about what they are doing to progress the ticket to resolution. You can buy a lot of grace by just setting and resetting expectations. In the restaurant analogy, this would be how many times the server comes back to your table to see if you need anything while waiting for your meal. If the plates are delayed it’s much nicer to have someone come by and say, “So sorry, I realize you’ve been waiting a while. I just checked with the kitchen and I should have your plates out to you in 10 minutes.” Without this simple polite update, you may grow annoyed that you’ve waited over 30 minutes and not even seen the server. Past Due The past-due gauge indicates a technician was scheduled to work on a ticket and that schedule has not been updated. This either happens because they didn’t enter time on the ticket or they didn’t do the scheduled work at all. Like Unassigned and Stale, this number should be kept at zero and will be green when it is zero, but will change color to indicate it requires attention when the number starts to click higher and turn red. Tech scheduling and time entry is much easier to keep under control when done hour by hour. If you get to the end of the week to try and manage time entry and scheduling, you’re always going to be chasing your tail. The dispatcher role can assist the team by at least informing the user that the scheduling of their support has been pushed. This is not something you can do frequently as the person will grow more frustrated by the ticket being delayed, but communicating with them and setting expectations is better than them expecting to hear from someone at 11 am, and getting angry when they don’t hear from someone the rest of the day. The dispatcher can support the team by ensuring they reschedule their tickets and manage their time entry. This helps to re-enforce the growth of this habit over time. It’s IT, it gets busy, so having someone ping you on IM or tap you on the shoulder to ask you to reschedule your tickets helps drive individual accountability. SLAs The above metrics are important to ensure the tickets are moved into the service queue and kept current, so they can be resolved as soon as possible. These would be lead indicators. When they turn red you are more likely to fail on the associated lag indicators. SLA compliance is a lag indicator. If you manage the team accountability and the process is followed your lag indicators should be green. I have a detailed blog on SLA management on my website that you can see here. Average Time to resolution The average time to resolution indicates how long it took for the ticket to be resolved. This is not the elapsed time, but the SLA work time to complete the ticket. This should be under 8hrs and the lower the better. It’s important that techs don’t game this number by using statuses that park the ticket and turn off the SLA. The client experience is the goal. Not the number itself. Average Time to Acknowledgement This gauge is the lag indicator for the new/unassigned gauge. If someone is responsible for the acknowledgment and dispatching of tickets at all times, this SLA is extremely easy to achieve. The one caution here is to train the techs not to try and hero their way through tickets, especially if they are currently holding the dispatch role. If it’s a 5-minute fix, sure do it, but otherwise, queue up the tickets and answer the next call/email. Not Started This gauge indicates tickets that have not been started after being put into someone’s queue. Notice this number is yellow despite being quite high relative to the thresholds of the other gauges. The size is also smaller than the other gauges, which communicates its importance. In this case, it’s not necessarily a problem that these many tickets haven’t been started. The thresholds on this number will depend a lot on how many techs you have available to service the support queue. The gauge gives the dispatcher an indication if work is piling up and not moving through the Helpdesk. The number may ebb and flow, but if it steadily climbs, it would indicate to the dispatcher or service manager that someone is stuck on tickets and probably taking too long on a single ticket. This can be great for catching complex support issues before they get out of control. An escalation or a second set of eyes may be helpful. Arming Dispatch With The Right Data “Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.” - Danny Myer, famous restaurateur. A well-configured BrightGauge dispatch dashboard can support the person responsible for dispatch management to focus on the right things: Managing by exception, keeping support requests flowing, and ensuring users are being kept up to date on the status of their support requests. Danny Myer’s quote underlines the importance of any service based industry. Make no mistake IT support is a service industry. How the client feels about their support is equally if not more important than the actual service provided. The experience the users receive is key to creating a sense of value for the support they are receiving. They expect you to be smart and to be able to fix the issues, but actively managing the experience they receive during that support request is what will set you apart from other providers. BrightGauge dashboards are a much easier way to provide an overview of the key metrics required to deliver a high-end support experience for your clients.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) can be invaluable for learning about your organization’s internal processes and identifying opportunities for improvement. However, many leaders wonder what specific KPIs they need to track to achieve better performance. The answer is: “It depends on what your goals are.” There are many different types of performance metrics that you can track—and what you want to track should change depending on what your goals are. It helps if you know what kinds of goals you have, and what KPIs are useful for those goals. With that in mind, here are a few KPI examples you can learn from, as well as a quick explanation of what performance metrics are. Here are a few different KPI examples that you might find interesting for setting your own goals: KPI example #1: Past due schedules Being able to stay on schedule is critical for service delivery. Tracking process metrics such as past due schedules helps you assess how effectively you’re meeting your time-based service level agreements (SLAs). The easiest way to do this is to take a look at your open schedules and see how many of them are past due vs the total amount. If there is an excessive amount of past due schedules, then you know there is a problem with your processes that needs fixing so that you can: Complete tasks more efficiently to avoid running late; or Revise schedule estimates to make them more realistic. This process metric helps your organization meet its SLA obligations more consistently by identifying opportunities for improvement. KPI example 2: Profit margin percentage Financial metrics are important to any organization. In a for-profit business, a KPI like profit margin percentage is almost always indispensable information. Profit margin percentage is frequently used by business owners and managers to assess the overall health of the business and establish whether current efforts are generating a worthwhile return on investment. Gross profit margin percentage can be calculated by taking your profits compared to your total expenses for generating that profit. For example, if a team has profits of $100,000 in a month, and their total expenses for salary, office/retail space, fuel, etc. was $50,000 for the same period of time, their gross profit margin would be 200% (100,000 / 50,000 = 2). If financial metrics like profit margin percentage are too slim (or are negative), then that’s a strong indication that changes need to be made. KPI example 3: Kill rate percentage For a service-oriented organization, performance metrics such as kill rate percentage are a great tool for monitoring how productive employees are. Kill rate percentage is an employee performance metric that measures how many tickets are opened vs the number of tickets that have been closed for a given employee or team during a set time period. Ideally, kill rate percentage should be at 100% or more. How can you have a kill rate percentage that is over 100%? By closing leftover tickets from a previous period. For example, say Shift A (9 am – 5 pm) opens 250 tickets, and closes 200 of them. Then Shift B (5 pm – 12:00 am), opens another 200 tickets, but closes 250 (completing the tickets left over from Shift A). Shift A’s kill rate percentage would be 80%, while Shift B’s kill rate would be 125%. What does this employee performance metric teach you? It could help you identify when a person or team is underperforming compared to their peers. In the above example, one shift is completing roughly 25% more work while being an hour shorter. This could be because of a number of reasons, such as disparities in team size, task complexity, and overall team motivation or skill. Using kill rate percentage to identify the discrepancy and investigate its cause could help you find ways to increase team productivity in the future. KPI example 4: Lead attrition In any sales process, there will be a certain amount of attrition as leads drop out. Tracking sales metrics such as lead attrition is crucial for ensuring a healthy sales process. For example, say your sales funnel has a 90% rate of lead attrition from initial contact to qualifying a lead. Such a high rate of attrition so early in the sales process could be an indication of a problem with the process. This could be caused by issues such as misaligned lead generation efforts (drawing in potential clients/customers who are a poor fit for your products and/or services) or sales team members making critical errors during their lead nurturing efforts (such as actively offending potential customers). By tracking lead attrition and identifying the cause, it is possible to improve your sales process and increase revenue generation. KPI example 5: Customer acquisition cost Marketing is a key activity for any business to attract customers. However, it’s important to balance the money spent on acquiring customers against their lifetime value to ensure that marketing efforts aren’t cutting into profits. This is where tracking marketing metrics such as customer acquisition cost becomes important. Marketing department leads can track spending for all of their efforts and compare that to the number of new customers generated by said marketing to determine their customer acquisition cost. For example, if the total spend for the marketing department is $100,000 dollars per year, and the department generates 100 leads during that time, then the customer acquisition cost would be $100 per customer. However, this alone doesn’t tell us whether the expenditure is sustainable or not. If the total value of a customer is less than $100, then the company is losing money on its marketing. If the lifetime value of a customer is significantly higher than $100, on the other hand, then spending $100,000 dollars to get 100 customers makes sense. Tracking customer acquisition cost and other marketing metrics can be immensely useful for optimizing your marketing and improving your return on investment for marketing spend. What are performance metrics/KPIs? Performance metrics, also known as KPIs, are a method of tracking or benchmarking specific activities and outcomes. They record a specific statistic so it can be used to measure progress. There are countless different KPIs you could potentially use to measure performance for your organization—far too many for any one person to track them all. Some performance metrics are simple to track (with the right tools, at least), while others can be harder to quantify accurately and objectively. The best KPIs tend to be ones that are: Easy to track; Possible to improve with effort; Relevant to your business’ goals; Simple to explain to employees; and Able to be completed in a timely fashion. Need help tracking performance metrics or want to learn more about KPIs? Reach out to the BrightGauge team for help and insights.

For MSPs, breaking into new markets can boost revenue and cultivate more opportunities to scale. But challenges such as upfront time and dollar costs often keep MSPs siloed into their specialties; meaning exploring new markets to break into can be a challenge. Every MSP wants to expand the services they offer to clients, but if you mainly focus on backup and recovery, dipping into a new market such as leasing hardware or phone management can be a considerable time investment. While there may be a significant need from your customer base, your business shouldn’t invest a large amount of time and money in becoming experts in another product or service when there is an easier solution. The key to adding new services only involves mastering one skill, and that skill is building partnerships with other vendors. Cultivating relationships with other businesses where you can recommend one another to customers can lead to increased profits without the same risks of your business learning a new market. Here are some easy ways MSPs can partner with other vendors to offer more services to clients and break into new markets. Resell equipment through a leasing company Almost every client you work with is going to need help acquiring hardware. Be it phones, computers, printers, or routers; the hardware is essential to any office environment. Every business needs these vital pieces of equipment to operate; even your own com To learn about the right tools to use, read more here. Ryan Goodman is one of the Founders of ConnectBooster and serves as its President. He primarily focuses on working with the sales team to develop their process and partners with MSPs to help them with their cash flow issues.

Choosing key performance indicators (KPIs, performance metrics) for your organization is crucial if you’re going to optimize performance over time. Choosing metrics that matter to your organization is necessary for finding opportunities for improving employee performance and making progress towards your goals. However, not just any random set of KPIs will work for your organization. To achieve the best results from KPI tracking, it’s important to choose metrics that matter. To help you out with this task, here are a few guidelines for choosing metrics and tips for analyzing them. Guidelines for choosing metrics that matter: Setting too many and too few metrics One of the first challenges you need to overcome when setting performance metrics is choosing how many metrics you want to track. Having too many or too few metrics can create problems for your performance management. Having too many performance metrics. If you choose to try to incorporate every possible KPI into all of your workflows and decision-making processes, you run the risk of data bloat. This can negatively impact workflows by obfuscating important data and increasing time spent on data management versus time spent using that data to make decisions. Having too few performance metrics. If you don’t track enough performance metrics, then you’ll have an incomplete picture of your organization’s (and employees’) performance. You may miss important insights that you could use to make significant improvements. When assessing what would be too many and too few metrics, consider your overall capacity for managing metrics and how hard each one is to quantify. For some organizations, tracking two or three metrics in relation to a particular goal is just fine. Other organizations, however, may need to track a couple of dozen metrics for different initiatives. It may help to try tracking a set of performance metrics for a while, and then assess how much time you’re spending on KPI management versus the results generated. If you find you’re spending too much time for little results, it may be a good idea to prune your KPI list a bit. Guidelines for choosing metrics that matter: Consider your overall goals When choosing key performance indicators to track, it is important to consider how the KPIs you choose align with your organization’s goals—both for the short and long term. If a performance indicator doesn’t align with your goals in some way, then it is most likely a waste of time and effort to track it. So, before you start setting KPIs, carefully consider what your organization’s goals are. As you choose KPIs to track, consider whether each one is useful for tracking progress towards a goal and/or how it can be used to meet goals. For example, if your goal is to increase sales by 10% year over year, then sales-focused KPIs such as closed deals, monthly recurring revenue, or total revenue in the sales pipeline would all be great to track. Guidelines for choosing metrics that matter: Periodically analyzing metrics as needs change Times change, and so too do your organization’s needs. While some basic KPIs will always be a good fit for your needs, you may find that there are times where a metric that was once worthwhile no longer helps you meet your goals. For example, say you started tracking a KPI because it aligned with a temporary initiative. Once the initiative is completed, does the KPI still serve a purpose? If not, then it may be time to clean your KPI list so you can avoid data bloat. Analyzing your metrics from time to time to reevaluate their value to your organization is a must for keeping a list of valuable KPIs while avoiding wasted time and energy. Guidelines for choosing metrics that matter: Consider how metrics interact There are times where a single data point doesn’t convey all of the information you need, but it can be combined with another bit of information to provide a valuable insight. Creating such data mashups and putting the results into an easy-to-read chart or graph can help you get the best results from your KPI tracking efforts. For example, say you wanted to track customer growth. A simple “total customers” KPI wouldn’t be a good measure of this, since it wouldn’t take into account actual activity. Instead, taking data points for total customers, total sign ups over the last 30 days, and customer attrition over the last 30 days would provide a far more accurate assessment of your overall customer growth or loss rate. Using this data, you could then investigate any recent changes or trends that may be contributing to attrition or growth. Also, comparing numbers for year-over-year can help you identify trends that may be seasonal in nature—such as an HVAC business noting a major increase in A/C repair requests during the midsummer months. Need more help choosing performance metrics that matter? Reach out to the BrightGauge team for more information and advice!

Once you get access to your data, it can be hard to know what to do with it. With so many KPIs and industry benchmarks, you may have a hard time figuring out exactly how these may apply to your bottom line. Join us for an in-person training session To ease the learning curve and provide you with hands-on, in-person training, we're hosting another Data Driven Workshop! This time, two in one month - a Pittsburgh session from September 29th thru 30th and another in Las Vegas from October 13th thru 14th. Find out more information here: https://www.brightgauge.com/data-driven-workshop/ All attendees will also be given a promo-link for a discounted hotel plus a special offer to attend our partner event with Continuum's leading MSP industry event Navigate, and which runs from Monday night through Wednesday. Each Data Driven Workshop, we spend a few sessions going over the basics of how to use BrightGauge -- from getting set up with dashboards for your team and creating automated reports for clients, to building advanced KPIs using multiple points of data to see how your techs time and effort are being spread or how much that ticket-happy customer is truly costing your business. We want you to walk away a BrightGauge pro and master of KPIs. As part of these workshops, you'll also get to learn about business best practices for growth through interactive peer sessions and a goal setting review. Plus, you'll get to hear from another power-user as they share how they've built out their account. These sessions are great for those just getting started or looking for insight into tricks for mastering BrightGauge. We'll give you the tools needed to better manage your data and team, while showing value to customers. "The BrightGauge Data Driven workshop had a ton of content for me and my colleague to learn and network. I highly recommend this for anyone looking to get more out of the software and get to know this vendor a little bit better. I left excited to build some advanced gauges for my company." -- NTM, workshop attendee How to sign up If you'd like to attend an upcoming workshop or inquire for more information, please fill out the form found at the bottom of this page: https://www.brightgauge.com/data-driven-workshop/

Most readers probably know what key performance indicators (KPIs) are by now, but just in case: KPIs are performance metrics that you can use to measure the performance of an employee, a team, or a business as a whole. Using KPI tracking, companies can benchmark their performance and progress towards important business goals. KPI tracking can be invaluable for identifying your biggest opportunities for improvement, motivating employees, and driving long-term success for the business. However, that’s only if you’re tracking the right business KPIs. Relying on poorly-chosen key performance indicators can cause more harm than good. One question that some business managers and owners have about KPIs is: “What are the worst KPIs to track for my company?” There are a lot of bad KPIs out there that, if used, can actually have a negative effect on employee engagement and overall business performance. Here’s a short list of some of the worst KPIs to track by type, which can help you spot a bad KPI in general. When reviewing this list, it’s important to remember that not all KPIs are equally good or bad for all businesses—some KPIs might work for one company but not another because of inherent differences in how the two operate and what their goals are. Worst KPIs to track: KPIs that are too easy to manipulate Most people want to have their performance recognized and KPI tracking makes for an easy way to get recognition. However, when a KPI is too easy to manipulate, it can lead to people abusing the KPI to artificially inflate their performance. For example, say your business has a call center that dials out to people to make cold sales calls or to follow up with customers who recently made a major purchase. One employee performance metric such a call center might track could be their number of outgoing calls. While this sounds like a good way to track call center activity, it may lead to some employees trying to inflate their numbers by making quick “dial and drop” calls that would never make an actual impact on the business’ goals. This scenario can be mitigated somewhat by tracking related employee KPIs for call centers, such as average time spent on the phone, successful close rate, and revenue per deal. Using these secondary employee performance indicators can help contextualize even a “bad” KPI that could be easily manipulated on its own. Worst KPIs to track: KPIs that are too vague Every KPI used in a business should have an objectively measurable value to go with it. If an employee performance indicator is too vague, employee engagement can easily suffer as your people struggle to meet their goals. For example, say your business had a KPI along the lines of “make the workplace neater” or something else similarly vague. In this instance, employees might clean up their desks and make their workspaces nicer, but still fall short of the goal because there’s no measurable standard. Worse yet, because the criteria for meeting or missing the goal is purely subjective, there’s the risk that some employees might see the evaluation as discriminatory, leading to reduced employee engagement and a whole mess of other problems. Instead, it’s better to set employee performance metrics that have a specific and measurable outcome that creates a clear pass or fail assessment that everyone can understand. This makes KPI tracking easier and more effective in the long run. Worst KPIs to track: KPIs that aren’t relevant to your business or industry Tracking business KPIs should never be a waste of time and effort. In most cases, even a “bad” KPI can at least provide some type of insight into your business operations, even when the data isn’t super useful—though it’s better to focus on better performance metrics whenever possible. However, one of the worst KPI tracking mistakes that a business can make is tracking metrics that aren’t relevant to its operations or industry. This is a mistake that can be easier to make than you might assume. For example, a team leader may accidentally add a KPI to a list without noticing, or decide they want to test out a metric, only to forget about it later. When you’re tracking numerous data sources across multiple dashboards, it’s easy for an irrelevant KPI to slip through the proverbial cracks. One or two of these won’t do much to slow operations. But, over time, they can lead to unnecessary data bloat that makes it harder to track your most important business KPIs. The best solution is to periodically check your KPI lists to identify irrelevant employee performance metrics and remove them. How can I spot bad KPIs? When you’re creating or cleaning your KPI lists, it can help to ask yourself the following questions: Is the KPI relevant to my team or business’ goals? Is the KPI necessary for some kind of regulatory compliance standard? Do my employees have any control over the employee performance metric? Can I easily measure the KPI? Could the KPI be easily abused to twist performance evaluations? Does the KPI establish a specific and easy to understand performance goal? Does this business metric indicate what I really want to know better than other related KPIs? Can I set goals with this KPI that can be met in a reasonable amount of time? If the answer to most of these questions is “yes,” then odds are it’s a good KPI. If the answer to all of these questions is “no,” then you may want to reconsider using that performance metric. Need help optimizing and tracking your KPIs to improve employee motivation, engagement, and productivity? Reach out to the BrightGauge team today to learn more!

As a BrightGauge user, you probably have multiple datasources you connect with. Many MSPs use a PSA like ConnectWise, an RMM like Datto, and a financial tool like Quickbooks to stay on top of all their important metrics. BrightGauge simplifies the way you monitor your data by putting all these metrics in one easy-to-access place. But did you know that, with BrightGauge, you can actually combine data from your different integrations into one super-powered gauge? It’s called data mashup and it’s pretty good if we do say so ourselves. What is a data mashup? The data mashup feature allows you to combine multiple sets of information and display them together for easy comparison. The first thing you should know is that this feature is only available to our users on the Enterprise Plan (if you want to upgrade your plan, here’s how to do it). The second thing to note is that there are two types of mashups: dataset and datasource. How do I create data mashups? The method for making a data mashup varies depending on whether you're mashing up datasets or datasources. Dataset mashups let you combine two or more datasets into a single gauge by layering the datasets together. For example, perhaps you’d like to see how many tickets each technician is resolving and how much time is being entered by that technician. That’s a dataset mashup that puts those metrics side by side. Here's an example of a dataset mashup: Datasource mashups are really similar to dataset mashups, but are pulled from two or more sources. Let’s say you use ConnectWise Manage and SmileBack. The data mashup feature would allow you to pull in metrics from both of those tools into one seamless gauge. When monitoring something like Tickets Resolved and CSAT by Tech, this feature is essential. Here's an example of a datasource mashup: BrightGauge makes it easy to create both dataset and datasource mashups by allowing you to easily define different datasets and/or datasources to combine. Simply select the datasets or datasources you want to use and plug them into a single data dashboard. The bar charts shown above are only one type of data mashup display. Depending on your needs or preferences, you can also create funnel charts, dials, circle graphs, or many more displays. What are the benefits of the data mashup feature? Combining your datasets or datasources will allow you to gain more powerful insights than if you were to track each piece of data separately. In some instances, it can even give you insights that you would not have seen without mashing up your data. Anything that makes your dashboards even stronger is going to help you make better business decisions that impact your bottom line. Above, we showed you what it would look like to see tickets resolved versus hours entered by technician. As a business manager, imagine using this gauge to make decisions about your team’s performance. You could use it to track multiple aspects of an employee's performance, then use that information to help them improve their productivity. For example, you could pull some ticket statistics and member data to create a technician utilization chart: An example of how to use a data mashup You may discover that one technician’s ratio of hours entered to tickets resolved isn’t adding up. They’re entering way too much time but not resolving many tickets within that time frame. Armed with this insight, you could approach that technician to see if something is going on that’s preventing them from answering more tickets. Or, if this is a pattern that’s developed over time, you may discover that this technician is no longer a right fit for your team. Or, you may even find that your team is overloaded and you need to add another member to your team. It's possible that this particular employee is being made to handle extra-complicated issues because that's their field of expertise and others can't handle it—leaving them to handle more time-consuming tasks than their peers. These are insights that you simply may have missed had you been tracking the data separately. By combining data in a data mashup, you can more easily identify these kinds of issues. This allows you to take the appropriate action to improve your team's efficiency, productivity, and results. BrightGauge data dashboards were designed to help you make sense of your KPIs and to help you make better and faster business decisions. Data mashups are like a dashboard superpower that make you an even stronger business leader. You can upgrade your plan today to gain access to this great feature.

Modern enterprises need modern solutions to their business process workflow challenges—at least if they want to remain competitive. Business management software represents a major opportunity for enterprises to smooth out their process workflows. However, what is business management software, really? There are many kinds of business software programs out there for managing different types of processes, such as: Sales Finance Human Resources (HR) Service Supply Chain These broad categories of business processes can be broken down into hundreds of different specific items, and some functions can even have a bit of overlap. This, in turn, means that the list of business management software that a company can use is virtually endless. So, which types of business management software should your organization use? Here are a few examples that you can start with, though this is not a comprehensive list by any stretch of the imagination. 1: Business Invoicing Programs Being able to effectively manage billing/collections is a necessity for any business. After all, if your business doesn’t get paid, the budget for funding projects, payroll, and maintenance is going to run dry fairly quickly. Business invoicing programs help companies with this basic financial task. While the specific capabilities of these bookkeeping solutions will vary from one vendor to the next, some common ones include: The ability to create new invoices—sometimes even automating the billing process. Online payment portals that can accept credit cards or other online payment platforms such as PayPal. Customer recordkeeping to help verify what amount of money is owed on each account. Tax data collection to automate filing processes for the business so customer payments are accurately reported. These are just a few of the potential features a business invoicing program might have. The big benefit of this software is that it helps to minimize late or missed payments while increasing the accuracy of financial records and projections. 2: Asset Management Software Managing the supply chain is an enormous task—one that only gets more difficult as the organization grows. Asset management software programs help to track and manage inventory, automate ordering processes, and provide critical insights into spending patterns. Of these capabilities, tracking spending patterns and invoices can be surprisingly important. Largely because it: Makes it easier to identify wasteful spending; and Helps to spot anomalous orders and invoices that indicate fraud. With asset management software, businesses can ensure that their supply chains operate efficiently by minimizing waste while avoiding shortages of critical resources. 3: Project and Task Management Software Keeping employees on task and helping them prioritize their efforts is crucial for ensuring efficiency and productivity. Project and task management software solutions, like Basecamp, JIRA, or Teamwork help companies do just that. The capabilities of these project and task management software programs do vary, but some of the basics include: Tracking total time spent on specific tasks; Logging which tasks are waiting to be worked on, in progress, or have been completed for a specific work period; and Displaying project details or requirements for an assignment to be considered complete. Project-oriented teams in an organization frequently use these features to review progress and identify issues on a daily or weekly basis. For example, if the time estimates for a given project aren’t matching actual time worked, that could be an indication that the project was under-scoped and needs to be adjusted. Data from these project and task management software solutions could potentially be fed into a key performance indicator (KPI) tracking dashboard for use during employee evaluations, as well. This would help you track employee performance and improve your human resources management. Speaking of which… 4: Human Resources Management Solutions HR is at the core of many modern organizations. Being able to effectively manage, train, and reward employees can mean the difference between having a strong, highly-engaged workforce and struggling with disengagement and poor-quality work. Human resources management solutions come all kinds of flavors, depending on the HR workflows you want to improve. Examples of HR solutions include: Employee training platforms; Benefits tracking solutions; and Employee assessment solutions. The specific benefits of human resources software can vary from one solution to the next depending on their features. However, common advantages of using HR solutions effectively include improving employee retention, productivity, and engagement throughout your organization. One type of business software that can be used for your HR processes—specifically to help track and improve employee performance—is KPI tracking software. Platforms such as BrightGauge make it easy to visualize and study your employee performance metrics so you can help your people realize their full potential. With employee data dashboards, you can easily identify opportunities for improvement and recognize/reward top performers in your organization. Want to get started on maximizing the potential of your people? Reach out to BrightGauge today!

Question: How much time does your business lose every month on redundant tasks? The cost varies from business to business, but IT service providers know downtime translates to lost profits because it diverts resources away from revenue-generating tasks. There are several ways companies can reduce the amount of lost time their teams experience on a weekly or monthly basis, such as tracking time to non-profitable tasks or time lost due to insufficient planning. However, one of the most simple changes a company can make is to use technology built for their needs. For instance, MSPs and IT providers require software that can manage tickets, equipment requests, and various recurring or one-off bills. If a business is using software not designed with those features, then the tools limited functionality is going to impede teams and create time-sucking manual workarounds that eat into their revenue-driving activities. Since decreasing the amount of time a business loses every month can impact their bottom line, here are a few things to do to limit the time spent on non-productive activities. Find software that automates manual tasks Time sunk on administrative tasks comes in several forms, from equipment breaking or failures in technology, but it can also include employees spending time and energy on internal tasks. MSPs fall victim to manually completing tasks instead of working with software to automate repetitive processes for them. Many times they even hire interns or spend weekends on manual tasks, instead of using a tool to automate those tasks. Why pay someone to do a task that could be automated? It saves time, and time is money, and $10/hour x 8 hours a day adds up quickly. Spending a little money every month to automate those pesky tasks that eat up one’s day is a great way to decrease costs as a business and will usually be cheaper in the long run. Make sure tools integrate with one another Business tools must be compatible and integrate to automate as much work as possible. Anytime tools do not integrate with each other; someone is going to have to have to bridge the gap and manually transfer the data; otherwise, there is a risk of something being missed. For example, if a business is using a specific CRM or PSA tool to track work via service tickets, the details from that ticket must be carried over from CRM or PSA to the software used for billing clients. But if using a billing software designed for retail, or even a different service-based industry, details between the two systems may be lost if they can’t transfer data between one another. Working with tools designed for IT professionals and MSPs means better integrations, which saves time and money by automating more data and requiring less hands-on management. Final thoughts on saving time Several things cause businesses to lose time every month on non-profitable tasks, and some are unavoidable. But automations and integrations are big ones and relatively easy to fix. Everything that increases operations and internal management of a team translates to better customer service, better response times, and people being able to get their tasks done as much as possible. To learn about the right tools to use, read more here. Ryan Goodman is one of the Founders of ConnectBooster and serves as its President. He primarily focuses on working with the sales team to develop their process and partners with MSPs to help them with their cash flow issues.

Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial for a business to measure and enhance success. Data dashboards help to make tracking important performance metrics easier for leaders who want to improve their company’s competitiveness. What is a data dashboard? Which types of data dashboards should you use in your organization? Here’s a quick explanation, followed by some data dashboard examples you can use for your business: What is a data dashboard? A data dashboard is a collection of important KPI information that is assembled into one convenient display. The specific performance metrics will vary between different types of data dashboards and the goals of the organization—a data dashboard for a sales team will be very different than the one used by a service delivery team, after all. Data dashboards can double as a motivational tool for some organizations, especially when those dashboards are put up in a display that everyone can see. Dashboards can also be incredibly useful for managers in their one on one meetings with team members—providing easy access to important performance data for assessing employees. What types of data dashboards should I use? There are many different types of data dashboards that you could create for your organization. Naturally, not all data dashboards are going to be useful for all organizations. Your company may need a specific type of data dashboard to track information for a particular goal or initiative. So, when looking at the following list of data dashboard examples, keep in mind your own business’ goals and needs, then use that information to determine whether each of these dashboards can benefit you: Data dashboard example #1: Employee dashboards This is one of the most common types of data dashboards used by every business—employee performance dashboards. However, while virtually any business can use employee dashboards, the specific KPIs that they track may vary from one company to the next. Even employee dashboards within the same company might differ depending on the employee’s specific role in the company. Two examples of KPIs that you might track on an employee dashboard include: Ticket Close Rate. For a service team member or call center employee, you might track how many service tickets that employee closes in a given week to benchmark their performance compared to their peers. Billable Project Hours. For project team members, measuring how much time each team member spends on a project helps with accurately billing projects and estimating employee efficiency. Data dashboard example #2: Sales team dashboards The sales team plays a key role in your business’ success by closing sales deals and building relationships with customers/clients. Tracking sales team performance metrics helps you identify strengths and weaknesses so you can improve their skills as a team. However, instead of tracking an individual employee’s performance, sales team data dashboards provide a broader scope of information, focusing on the team as a whole with metrics such as: Overall Sales Funnel. This performance metric helps to visualize the count of opportunities created as well as closed/won deals. Looking at the last 30 days, you can see how your sales team is performing and compare it to their yearly averages and goals. Total Pipeline Dollars. How much money is sitting in your pipeline, waiting to close? Tracking your total pipeline dollars, as well as how far along each deal in your pipeline is, can help you predict how much revenue your business can expect in the next month. Tracking the rate at which you close deals on top of this metric can help to further refine your income estimates. Data dashboard example #3: Client services dashboards For B2B (business to business) service-oriented companies, being able to meet contractual service level agreements (SLAs) with clients can mean the difference between sustained success and losing market share. Tracking KPIs related to these SLAs is a must for B2B companies. While the specific KPIs you will track on your client services dashboard will vary depending on the nature of the services you provide, a couple of potential performance metrics you might use include: New Tickets. A measure of the number of unresolved tickets that have not been responded to yet. Can be combined with tickets currently open to showcase how much work is being generated, which helps to put response time and other metrics into perspective. Tickets Waiting on Customer. A measure of how many open tickets are waiting on input from the customer before they can be worked on. Putting this into a report for your clients helps encourage them to respond to inquiries more quickly, which allows your team to provide faster service. Data dashboard example #4: Financial performance dashboards Rather than measuring the performance of any one team or team member, financial performance data dashboards help you get a picture of your company’s financial health at a glance. This can be crucial for spotting issues that threaten the future viability of your company. A couple of financial performance metrics you might track for your company include: Past Due Receivables Amount. Accounts receivable is critical because it helps you set an expectation for your income from clients within a set period of time. Past due accounts receivable highlights which clients you need to increase your outreach with. Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. Abbreviated EBITDA, this metric helps establish your overall profitability and is often used to calculate things such as employee bonuses. Do you need help creating comprehensive and effective data dashboards to help your business achieve maximum performance? Reach out to the team at BrightGauge to learn more!