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Our partners often ask, “What are other people doing? How can I be leveraging Tier2Tickets/Helpdesk Buttons better?” So last week, we invited three partners who have successfully deployed the software to share how they’ve implemented Tier2Tickets and Helpdesk Buttons. Brent, Chad, and Ian joined us for our Tier2Tuesday Webinar (Zoom link, includes chat logs) to share a high-level look at their companies and talk about how they use Tier2Tickets in their day-to-day operations to save time, improve service, think strategically, and close sales.  

Meet our Panel Partners 

• iTech Las Vegas and Brent Goodfellow, COO  
  iTech Las Vegas is a 10-person team that specializes in automobile dealerships. It opened in 2007 and now serves 60 customers with just over $3mil in annual revenue. They found T2T though Pax8 when looking for ways to become more efficient. There’s a lot of turnover in the automobile industry, and iTech Las Vegas uses Tier2Tickets to simplify the onboarding and offboarding process.  

• ITPartners+ and Chad McDonald, CTO
  ITPartners+ launched out of a break/fix operation. It’s a relatively new MSP that works in fully managed and co-managed spaces. By offering co-managed services, ITPartners+ can augment existing, small IT teams to help with the things they don’t have time to do; a lot of the time, they just need someone to manage their helpdesk. ITPartners+ is a 16-person operation (they have 4 open positions posted) looking to close $5mil at the end of this year. They joined T2T after reading about us on Reddit. The Helpdesk Button was still a beta but “did one thing really well, and that was make it easy to get support – that was our driver.”  

• Richardson & Richardson Consulting and Ian Richardson, Managing Partner
  While at the MSP he started, Doberman Technologies, Ian was Tier2Tickets’ first partner. Doberman was initially focused on healthcare, specifically security and compliance. Then that shifted to regulatory compliance in other fields like PCI, CMMS, SEC. In 2020, Ian sold Doberman Technologies and opened Richardson & Richardson Consulting – a strategic management and consulting agency focused on IT – with his wife, Carrie. It was Carrie that first told Ian about Tier2Tickets. “She called me up and said, ‘you’re gonna wanna have this conversation. You’re going to want to talk with these guys.” And we’re glad she did. Before we even knew how we would accept payments, Ian signed up.   

The Conversations

Our goal for Tier2Tickets has always been more than just an easy way to submit help tickets – it’s really about saving you and your team time, effort, and energy. Our panelists discussed ways they make Tier2Tickets work for them.  

iTech Las Vegas has taken advantage of nearly every automation we offer. For example, they use Tier2Forms to onboard (and offboard) end-users. As soon as a request comes in to add a new resource, Tier2AI picks up on it and directs the end-user to a form that includes all the information required to set up a new user, which streamlines the entire process! Learn more about Tier2Forms and while you’re at it, check out Tier2Assists, which allows you to suggest additional steps to the user after they submit a ticket. 

ITPartners+ core values are Do Great Work, Think Big, and Make It Fun. So how do you make tech support fun? Give your end-users a Helpdesk Button and let them experience a “little bit of magic” when they hit the button and get help quickly. ITPartners+ supports 180 customers and is rolling out buttons to all of them.  

Because again, [Tier2Tickets] is the best way to submit a ticket. From their side, it’s the easiest; from our side, it’s the richest. And so, it’s just a win all the way around. The marginal cost of the hardware buttons and the monthly fee are far made up for in the time efficiencies gained and the overall customer experience improvement too. 

ITPartners+ credit positive adoption of Helpdesk Buttons by getting their clients excited to use the button. Chad shared their Helpdesk Button marketing video, and sent along a follow-up training video they’ve made: both of which, he invites you to use as inspiration for your own videos. Key word is inspiration: please be respectful of Chad and his team and don’t rip and add your branding, but definitely show to your team or videographer to make your own! We would love to see what your own, unique marketing materials to get your end-users excited about using Tier2Tickets look like, so please send them along and we’ll proudly share! (We also have brandable collateral available on our website.) 

Implementing Tier2Tickets at Doberman Technologies meant they could squeeze more productivity out of the tech desk by reducing time spent on tickets. They realized each technician asked the same 6-8 questions to get the information needed to solve a ticket successfully. Who does it impact? When did it start? Is it intermittent? Can you recreate it? Using the Helpdesk Buttons, they were able to eliminate those asks, which improved tech efficiency and improved the experience for the client. Doberman Technologies saw an increase in first touch resolve rates on Tier2Tickets versus standard tickets. Ian, a self-proclaimed math guy, shared the cascading impact of implementing Tier2Tickets. Simply put, it improves efficiency and costs less money to solve tickets. Ian talks through the savings on the webinar (38:10 – 42:47), and we offer a calculator that can help you understand how Tier2Tickets can impact your bottom line.  

We don’t think an hour is ever enough time to spend with you, but an hour’s all we had. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Each quarter, we will host a session that will range between a panel of our partners to discuss Tier2Tickets or a tutorial on how we can help you get the most out of us. In the meantime, as a reminder, we’ve added a ton of new features, and our current General Availability is 1.1.x.26 – be sure to sign in to your account, check out our changelog, or set up an updated demo call to get caught up with the features!   We look forward to you joining our next event on Tuesday, June 7th, 2022 at 1pm ET.

Talk to you soon, 

Tier2Tickets 

PS – HammerTech won the webinar raffle for one year of free service!  

PPS – Thank you to everyone for joining our webinar (even all the Chris Wheelers.) We loved to see the conversations happening in the chat. We’ve collected all the questions and posted them below.  

The Questions

Can Tier2Tickets be used in conjunction with a traditional RMM?   

Yes! Tier2Tickets is not a replacement for a traditional Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software. Instead, it’s a supplemental workflow tool designed to fill in the gaps that traditional platforms have left behind. If your RMM supports it, work Tier2Tickets into your RMM tray icon. We recommend adding an option to the RMM menu for “submit a support ticket” to launch the Tier2Tickets software. We have guides available for a few RMMs in the deployment section of our knowledge base.  

How do you retrain users who are used to sending support requests to support@ for many years?  

This won’t be an overnight change. You’ll have very good adoption with new clients, but older clients may take longer to change. Here are some best practices to deploy our software.  

1. Deploy to all your endpoints as a reliable part of your processes and workflows.  
2. Make launching Tier2Tickets visually obvious for your customers.   
3. Provide customers with hands-on training that fits their needs.  
4. Use incentives to encourage your customers to submit tickets by Tier2Tickets. That could be prioritizing tickets submitted via Tier2Tickets over tickets submitted by other methods.  
5. Work Tier2Tickets into your other customer-facing processes.   

We offer specialty onboarding services to ensure a smooth launch. Email us at sales@tier2.tech to ask about a White Glove Onboarding.  

What about adoption for users who work from home or travel a lot? Is it harder to get the end-user to start the support process without the physical button?   

Some of our partners (Like iTech Las Vegas) don’t use the physical button at all! Instead, they rely on a hotkey, a shortcut icon on the user’s desktop, or the windows taskbar icon to launch the software. Whatever method you choose, your end-user will be guided through a friendly and easy way of submitting a ticket. (Newer versions of Tier2 will automatically pin a “help” icon to the Windows taskbar.)  

When onboarding new clients, how do you handle potential privacy concerns [about screenshotting]?  

Tier2Tickets was built with security in mind at each step of the ticket creation process. First, how the software works: the ButtonHelper executable runs on the system and takes screenshots when certain key inputs are hit by the user. Screenshots are stored in memory until a ticket is submitted – the data is never saved to disk. Once the user starts the ticketing software, the collection scripts gather information and process the images into a compressed format.     

Understandably, some people may be concerned about privacy during this process. However, information is not sent from the user’s machine without affirmative consent, and Tier2Tickets automatically scrubs data from the system after 90 days (90 days is the default, but if you want to adjust the time, contact us!). We designed this software to meet the needs of our customers who face regulatory oversight (HIPAA, SOX, etc.) and need to comply with strict data security laws. If it’s not already, consider covering these concerns in your privacy agreement with your customers.   

I have a problem using [insert software name here] with Tier2Tickets. What can I do? If it’s not working for you, it’s not working for us! If you need help figuring something out, check out our Tier2Tickets Documentation page, email support (support@tier2.tech), or call us!