ConnectWise for MSPs
Updated November 16, 2015
ConnectWise for MSPs
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
2015.2
Modules Used
- Quosal
Overall Satisfaction with ConnectWise
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Using ConnectWise
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.
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.
- Resource Scheduling
- Tracking Time against Agreements
- Improved resource management
- Better reporting on key metrics
- Service delivery is built on the ITIL standard
- 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.
- Improve Project Management
- Project Surveys
- Leverage more automation through workflows
- Hopefully the Knowledge Base will improve and we can utilize it.
Evaluating ConnectWise and Competitors
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.
- 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.
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
- Implemented in-house
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.
- 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
| 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 |
Yes - The product is too important not to have full support.
Yes - Yes, the recent product development team is aggressively and quickly addressing any product flaws. Bugs seem to be fixed in one to four weeks.
We had some database issues, stemming from an update. ConnectWise support was able to identify the table corruption and work with us overnight to resolve the issue.
Using ConnectWise
| 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 |
- Ticketing
- Workflows
- Project Management
- Invoicing
- QuickBooks Integration
Yes - It works, but not well enough for us to use at this time.