Onboarding new clients can be a very time-consuming process for MSPs.
To get the lay of the land, you typically need to make the trip to the client site, crawl through switch closets, perform a site survey, and complete many more manual tasks. But even after that investment of time and resources, sometimes you don’t get the full picture.
For one MSP, onboarding without Auvik meant spending days every single month manually drawing network maps for each new client.
“Let’s say it’s a medium-sized network. We’d probably spend a good 15-40 hours just drawing out the network, understanding what the customer had: what ports, what interfaces. It took a lot of time and a lot of investigation but we had to do that to understand how to properly support the network.”
But what else can you do?
Without an accurate picture of the client’s network, including a comprehensive device inventory, you could be missing information vital to servicing their IT effectively and strategically. Yet, even after all that work, you might still have the network drawn out all wrong.
With Auvik, you can map networks with confidence. A core Auvik feature is its ability to automatically discover and map a network and to maintain that map in real-time. With a complete picture of the entire network, you can better understand and support the client.
That’s why Lucas Messina, practice group leader at Kraft Kennedy, started using Auvik during new client onboarding.
“We didn’t have a good way to feel comfortable we’d found everything until we started using Auvik. It really helped us be more confident that we were seeing what was there. That was very helpful to us as part of the onboarding process.”
In Auvik, the inventory discovered during onboarding provides vital data to help you understand how devices connect and how they’re configured.
This mitigates the need for you to spend hours (if not days or weeks) documenting the data manually. Corey Kirkendoll from 5K Technical Services says:
“Onboarding used to be an extra couple weeks spent on-site, pulling cables. Now, once we load the Auvik agent, it brings back everything we need, giving us an accurate, real-time view of the network. Now we spend our time focusing on better serving our customers’ networks because we’re not spending time documenting.”
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Luis Alvarez of Alvarez Technology Group says Auvik’s depth of detail also takes the legwork out of client onboarding:
“Auvik is a great documentation tool. When you deploy it during onboarding or discovery, it’ll tell you what you don’t know and what you need to find out—passwords, SNMP strings, etc. It’s indispensable.”
Those details can help you proactively identify issues and solve them prior to committing to a client. Jason Whitehurst, vCIO of NoctisIT, says:
“The tipping point [for purchasing Auvik] was how quickly it built out a mature infrastructure map and how quickly it was able to help us identify significant issues that would need to be remediated before we went to work with the customer. Our average onboarding revenue has gone up by probably 30% since we implemented Auvik.”
Another way Auvik helps streamline client onboarding is by integrating with other tools in your software stack to make information more readily accessible.
Marshall Rownd, central services manager at Datapath, says he saves the most time by integrating Auvik with his other go-to tools: ConnectWise Manage, ConnectWise Automate, and IT Glue. After he uses ConnectWise Automate to discover endpoints, he’ll activate the Auvik collector to round out his documentation.
“One of the biggest benefits of using Auvik in a new client onboarding process is we have it integrated. Our engineers don’t have to waste time jotting down model numbers and serial numbers—ConnectWise Manage syncs that up into IT Glue for us. We’ve onboarded clients where they’ve wasted time doing that stuff manually.”
With the time saved during onboarding and increased visibility into your client networks, you can spend your time familiarizing yourself or other members of your team with your clients’ IT environments—which goes a long way in maintaining a great relationship with your clients.
In fact, Daniel Rogers of Cadan Technologies uses Auvik to empower his team and boost their confidence when talking to clients:
“Auvik helps our team members be more confident when they’re interacting with a client because they know what’s going on in the environment and they can feel like an expert. That visibility also helps us solve issues faster. The faster we can do that, the happier our clients are.”
Fast onboarding and following through on your sales promises? That’s a recipe for happy customers.
