In the IT/ISP industry, we sometimes experience customers quickly pointing the finger toward their support company if they lose Internet access and therefore, VoIP, browsing and other services. The majority of short lived problems are often Internet related and need to be assessed quickly in order to keep customer confidence.
If your business handles customer premise managed services such as VoIP, networking, computing environments, then you know that too often when something becomes unreachable, customers immediately think the problems are local. It doesn’t take much for customers to blame your services and it is very important to end the finger pointing, regaining their confidence.
When customers call, you immediately have to look into the situation and quite often, eventually assess the issue must have been temporary loss of Internet access. But, you cannot be certain and the time it takes to do this is basically wasted. The worse part is that the customer immediately looked at your services for answers.
Saving on wasted time and ensuring customers that everything on premise is working as it should be are key to successful relationships.
In IT, we know that hardware, software, cabling and other things certainly can and do fail but a well maintained environment typically has very high up times. When Internet issues come up, most of the time there is no evidence, no useful data to help you determine what the problem was, until now.
Meet the ‘MSP Sensors’ service
The first step is monitoring customer premise Internet issues by installing MSP Sensors agents at their locations.
Agents need only a free DHCP Ethernet enabled port which means that even customers could install them. The devices use only about one amp of power, are self updating, and running software on PC/servers, are never accidentally turned off.
Agents are free to download or a one time cost for hardware and a small monthly fee if Extended reports are needed. This is a cost that you can either absorb by saving time and money or pass on to the customer. The solution is very inexpensive, requires no large budgets to start, simply add as needed.
Quickly determine Internet issues
As an organization installing agents at customer locations, you see an overview dashboard which visually alerts you of problems with one or any number of locations. The overview shows if agents are no longer communicating, have environmental issues if you opt for environment sensing and show if unauthorized firewall ports suddenly show up.
Best of all, agents have a built in DNS server for upstream redundancy and give you secure encrypted access to that location without having to open any firewall ports. Perfect for equipment rooms and remote LAN’s where you would prefer not showing open firewall ports to public.
Each agent has its own dashboard showing how that particular Internet connection is doing. Admins can set alerts which can be sent to multiple people to ensure that someone has responded and dealt with the alert.
Get ahead of the problems
By monitoring the CPE, you will not only eliminate truck rolls to look for problems that don’t exist and you’ll gain customer confidence by being proactive about problems at their locations.
You will also gain a number of tools and information all nicely packed into a tiny device without having to install any monitoring software on your customers servers.
