Item: ConnectWise PSA
Rating: 9
Author: Delano Collins

Overall Satisfaction with ConnectWise

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ConnectWise has the unique ability to tie together all people and processes within our organization, making it an essential tool for everyone in our organization. From service to sales to finance to product integration, ConnectWise is designed to weave all of these disparate silos together into a centralized, meaningful way. Many of the products and services we use, tie directly into ConnectWise, making alerting, ticketing and billing a snap. With scheduling, time entry, ticket tracking and workflow automation features, not only is invoicing is more efficient than ever but the product has been designed to be scalable to grow with your organization.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Agreement billing is easy with correct work role and work type configurations, giving you the ability to streamline your billing process, but also the flexibility to easily address your clients with unique billing arrangements.
Workflows can be configured to alert anyone in your team to exception-conditions. Expiring agreement in 3 months? Warranty expiration in 45 days? Negative survey? Missed SLA? Emergency tickets? Not a problem with Connectwise's workflows.
Product integration allows for better alerting, with improved ticket categorization for data analytics.
Outside Sales benefits from improved reporting helping you determine what is and is not working, track your sales quotas and project your growth based on successful sales.
Inside Sales benefits from streamlined quote creation and delivery, activity and ticket tracking all while delivering key sales metrics.
New GUI Reporting interface allows SQL-novices to drag and drop fields to make the reports that are meaningful to you.

Cons

Knowledge Base is weak.
The ability to send Project surveys is limited to tickets within the Project, but not the project itself.
The current release cycle is very aggressive. Be prepared to update the program every 30 (or fewer) days.
The program's flexibility can be a weakness, so you will need to educate your team. ConnectWise University is a great resource - use it.

Return on Investment

Better data analytics to identify problematic products and services.
Increased employee utilization, better resource management.
The product's workflow automation allows for scalability.
Directly improves customer service through the closed loop features.
Indirectly improves service through reporting, which allows us to better know what we do and don't do well.

Alternatives Considered

Autotask

We selected ConnnectWise over Autotask due to the tighter integration for sales modules, workflow capabilities and improved product integration.

Likelihood to Recommend

The solution's flexibility ensures that you will find it being used by a lot of different companies in different ways. For a company that delivers products and services, we feel it is the right fit for us. For those choosing ConnectWise, you will want to identify whether you feel the on-premise or hosted / cloud version is the best fit for you. Up front costs can be challenging for small organizations, but make sure you allocate the time and resources to ensure proper training. In addition, try to adopt best practices and train your employees on these practices - it will save you a lot of headaches later on.

Using ConnectWise

Users and Roles

100 - All employees, including Administration, Billing, Inside Sales, Outside Sales, Account Executives, Network Operation, Security Operations and all Service and Support engineers use ConnectWise to schedule (uses Outlook sync), track their time, track products and services, and prioritize their task list. Administration and team managers use the product to track their team, resources and key metrics.

Support Headcount Required

2 - Product support is fairly easy, although there are a lot of product updates. In our organization, the CIO and the manager of the Network Operations team provide in-house support. We utilize a monthly patch cycle which has been successful for us. Once the product is installed and correctly configured, it does not take much effort to maintain the system.

Business Processes Supported

Resource Scheduling
Tracking Time against Agreements
Improved resource management
Better reporting on key metrics
Service delivery is built on the ITIL standard

Innovative Uses

Workflows
Automated alert notification letting the system tell "Freemium" clients when alerts happen, and letting the clients leverage 'Self - service" to tell us when they want us to resolve an issue.
Customized reporting. Once we found we could dig into the database, we've been creating custom reports ever since. The last time I checked, I think we had around 110 custom reports.

Future Planned Uses

Improve Project Management
Project Surveys
Leverage more automation through workflows
Hopefully the Knowledge Base will improve and we can utilize it.

Likelihood to Renew

ConnectWise has uniquely positioned themselves with the Modern Office Suite to have direct integration with a nearly full suite of tools for MSPs. Although each tool may not necessarily be the absolute best tool on the market, the efficiencies leveraged through direct integration make the entire suite an obvious choice for most companies.

Evaluating ConnectWise and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - We have grown through mergers and acquisitions, but these groups have previously used Autotask and Numera's Track-It. We chose ConnectWise early on based on our growth projections. We felt we wanted to make the switch to a product that had the ability to serve our needs no matter what our size, and we only wanted to make the switch once.

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Usability
Third-party Reviews

The ability to weave together, in a scalable way, every aspect of our organization, as well as many of the products and services we sold, made ConnectWise an obvious choice for us. No other product seemed to have all of these pieces, that could pull these disparate entities together in such a seamless manner.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

If we had to go through the process again, we would make the same decision to use ConnectWise, although I like to think we would have better trained our employees and better adopted best-practices.

ConnectWise Implementation

Implementation Rating

Thoroughly review the training at ConnectWise University BEFORE starting. Ask questions to other partners - there is a huge community that is more than willing to help. Lastly, I recommend getting ConnectWise Consulting to help - it's a BIG product, and the money you spend on consulting will pay for itself by helping you and your team get off to a running start (in the right direction).

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

Implementation Phases

Change Management Lessons

Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - When we first implemented ConnectWise, we were a much smaller firm and change management was not a big hurdle for us. As we grew, we found that different groups within the organization used ConnectWise in different ways. We recently worked with ConnectWise Consulting for a thorough system review to improve our processes and leverage greater efficiency.

Implementation Issues

Encouraging the employees to adopt the best practices.
Training.
Understanding how data flowed from time entry to agreements to billing. It took some time to get invoicing adjusted.

ConnectWise Support

Support Rating

Well trained, available and caring team of support engineers.

ConnectWise PSA Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Quick Initial Response	Escalation required

Using ConnectWise

Usability

The program does so much for our organization, it is impossible to think of using anything else.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Convenient Feel confident using	Requires technical support Slow to learn Lots to learn