Increase MRR While Reducing Costs At Your MSP

An important part of running a successful Managed Service Provider (MSP) is ensuring you’re increasing your monthly recurring revenue (MRR). One way MSPs can do this is by lowering the costs associated with running your MSP. CyberHoot works directly with MSPs and understands the various hurdles they have to keep their clients secure while weighing how to improve their MRR. 

The Hurdles

Managed Service Providers’ job is to provide security stacks for their clients so they don’t fall victim to the various threats they face on a day-to-day basis. One way an MSP can lose MRR is by providing a security stack that is insufficient, leading to security incidents at their clients. This can end up being detrimental to an MSP as they may lose that client when a client loses faith that their MSP can keep them secure.

Another way an MSP may lose revenue is through numerous support tickets from their customers. Support tickets from clients can eat up profits quickly. Spending a large portion of your day taking support calls or responding to potential security threats/incidents can eat up time spent on improving your security stack or bringing in new customers. 

You may lose revenue when support tickets come in during the workweek, but what about when you receive critical support alerts on weekends or late at night when you’re ‘off the clock’? Most security incidents occur on nights and weekends and take your most valuable MSP resources (senior engineers) away from friends and family to remediate a customer’s issues. As an MSP owner, you need to worry about burnout or resignations in a hot IT marketplace. Lowering incidents, and moving most work from reactive to proactive, can help reduce stress on your staff, improve profit margins, and ultimately builds customer loyalty from fewer critical events.

How To Improve MRR

There’s a simple and easy way to improve MRR and help alleviate the hurdles aforementioned. Utilizing a strong Security Awareness Training (SAT) tool like CyberHoot can certainly help you maintain existing MRR and even improve a business’ MRR. Using SAT to train your MSP and customers’ users can be beneficial as they won’t be unprepared for the threats they’re facing. 

With the first hurdle, MSPs may have an insufficient security stack due to it not including security awareness training for their customers. SAT can significantly reduce the likelihood of a breach, as research suggests human error is accountable for 90% of security breaches. In fact, 99% of security professionals that experienced a breach at their organization within the last two years agreed that it would have been preventable with the right measures in place. And, as the most common answer, 71% said that better security awareness training for users would have helped minimize or prevent those breaches. Currently, only 60% of MSPs offer it as part of their managed services offering.  Adding SAT to your managed service offerings can boost MRR from clients increasingly seeking out such services to protect their employees and businesses.

Secondly, support tickets can be reduced dramatically by an MSP using the right SAT tool for the job. Not only can they reduce tickets logged relating to security events, but they can also reduce tickets for products you roll out to your clients. Imagine an SAT tool that includes product training on your technology stack so that it trains and educates users on how to use the software solutions you deploy outside of helpdesk tickets?  While this doesn’t boost MRR directly, by decreasing support tickets, your existing staff can manage more clients who are generally happier with your technology support as they put new systems and tools to use more effectively through such training. 

After-hours tickets are the most costly to your MSP business. Engineers who are called in after-hours put delays on the next day’s projects as they may need to sleep in or take the day off entirely. Reducing these after-hours security tickets can improve morale, reduce burnout, lower your MSP’s costs, and increase the ratio of clients to support staff. It’s a win for everyone. 

What SAT Tool To Use?

Not all SATs are created equal. Most SMBs and MSPs complain they don’t have the time to deploy a new tool or technology. You need to find an SAT that doesn’t take much to administer, is easy to consume by your clients, and eliminates friction everywhere it can. This is where CyberHoot excels.

CyberHoot helps alleviate these hurdles by giving users engaging, short awareness training. Twelve monthly videos can be assigned to users in under 60-seconds via our programs module. Trainees don’t have to fight with logins and passwords. Let’s take a closer look at how CyberHoot handles these situations to make your experience pain-free and simple.

LOGIN FRICTION virtually ELIMINATED

All CyberHoot training is sent directly to each user’s inbox. Users click a link and are instantly training; no user login to a website is required. This eliminates a common point of friction for end-users that leads to much lower compliance.

CyberHoot’s OPEN PLATFORM ELIMINATES BOREDOM FRICTION

Most SAT platforms are closed. You get their single flavor of ice cream for as long as you use their product. This significantly harms user participation the longer you play the same flavor of awareness video to users. CyberHoot eliminates boredom through an open platform that allows MSPs to provide users with novel content every month. An open platform also covers emerging threats when they occur, from the best online sources, orchestrated by CyberHoot so you don’t have to track or worry about anything.

PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS TRAINING ELIMINATES SUPPORT FRICTION FOR MSPS

MSPs often dread rolling out new technology and applications to clients. They fear the influx of support tickets, the incessant questions of how do you do this or that?

CyberHoot’s open platform allows MSPs to embed product training with their project deployments. Imagine the reduction in helpdesk calls when you automatically asynchronously train your client’s users on Microsoft Teams, LastPass, O365, or your SPAM filter during the project’s rollout? Users are happier learning how to put the new tools to use and the MSP earns incredible value and loyalty from their clients.

CyberHoot includes over 60 product training programs for free to help users become productive with all Microsoft products, any security products (LastPass, 1Password, BitWarden), sales tools (HubSpot, Salesforce), finance applications (QuickBooks, ADP), and much more. We’re open so, if you don’t see something, it can be added in less than 1 minute.

SAT WITHOUT TESTING IS A MISTAKE

One CyberHoot client sent its first phishing test after 3 years of security awareness training. The results of this test seemed to call into question the value of SAT because dozens of people clicked the phishing test links and 7 people provided their credentials in this test. Shocking! Why?

The answer is interesting. It turns out the users had the knowledge all along but failed to apply it as they were never tested on it. Not one user provided credentials ever again after the first test, proving they knew what to do and did it when tested. This is why quarterly phish testing is so important. It holds your users accountable without becoming a burden (more phishing tests are less productive).

GUIDE EMPLOYEES WHEN TECHNOLOGY CAN’T

Creating governance policies and processes is hard work. Editing a well-built policy to suit your business is easy.

CyberHoot provides all your cybersecurity governance policy needs in our Policy module. Send governance policies directly to users’ inboxes, have them read through, and electronically sign their signature to acknowledge and track user compliance. CyberHoot recommends all businesses adopt 5 or 6 policies and processes from our templates. This can be accomplished in under an hour of work. For more cyber-mature clients, CyberHoot provides 23 ready-made cybersecurity policy templates that can be easily adopted by our clients. 

KNOW YOUR EMPLOYEES DARK WEB EXPOSURE

CyberHoot includes Dark Web monitoring and reporting for all users in our tool. We leverage two dark web databases to identify email addresses exposed online in data breaches. New exposures are reported to administrators who can escalate to end-users. Admins are provided with detailed response instructions to make reporting easier.

ELIMINATE COMPLIANCE FRICTION

Many SATs suffer from poor compliance. CyberHoot eliminates compliance friction by automating most of these processes with zero administration. User compliance is improved by automatically emailing Managers when their employees don’t complete assignments. Weekly recursive summary reports are sent to management for action.