Managed Service Providers (MSPs) handle a multitude of customer support cases, each requiring efficient routing to the right team member. Squadcast's Webforms provide a solution to expedite issue reporting and streamline resolution. In this blog, we will explore how MSPs can leverage webforms to enhance the customer support experience.

Common MSP Use Case

1. Hotline Numbers: Traditionally, using hotline numbers poses challenges such as missed calls and delays, leading to extended resolution times for IT support requests. Moreover, direct engagement in calls by On-Call members can be time-consuming and may not efficiently capture all necessary details.

2. Streamlining Internal IT Support: Internally, webforms can streamline IT support requests for employees within the organization. Employees can use these webforms to report technical issues, ensuring timely assistance and improving organizational efficiency.

Solution: Adopting Squadcast Webforms

To overcome the limitations of hotline numbers, MSPs can adopt Squadcast Webforms, which offer several key advantages:

• Structured Incident Reporting: Webforms provide a standardized method for customers to report issues, ensuring all essential details are captured accurately.

• Efficient Incident Management: When customers fill out Webforms on the MSP's website or support portal, incidents are automatically created in Squadcast, setting off the regular on-call roster and escalation process.

• Seamless Communication: Webforms supports notifications for customers who reported the incident, keeping them informed of the incident's acknowledgement and resolution.

• Reduced Manual Routing: With predefined services and routing rules, incidents are directly routed to the subject matter experts, minimizing the time and effort spent on manual routing within the organization.

• Customizable and Professional: Squadcast Webforms are customizable, allowing MSPs and other organizations to add their company logo and tailor input fields for different types of incidents.

Implementing Squadcast Webforms: The How-To Guide

Creating multiple Webforms with Squadcast is a breeze. MSPs can customize forms based on specific customer needs, such as regional impact or affected services. Every Webform has a unique URL that can be easily embedded in customer accounts or product portals, providing a seamless incident reporting experience.

Additionally, Squadcast also offers the option for a custom domain. This means that you can use your own domain name, such as https://support.example.com, for your Webforms instead of the default Squadcast domain.

Here are the steps to configure Webforms in Squadcast:

1. Form Configuration, where you can add a name & check your form public URL or check the checkbox to set up a custom domain instead. You can also add tags here. Tags on webforms help classify different webforms better.

2. Owner & Services, where you can add an owner that enables streamlined assignment of incidents and service requests from customers. You can add services for which you’re creating these webforms.

Once the form is submitted, an incident is automatically created in Squadcast. This also triggers the escalation policy associated with particular services, notifying subject matter experts based on the services being affected.

3. Input Configuration, allows adding custom input fields for webforms like severity, priority, etc. which will help users to define their problems more clearly.

4. Additional Details, which includes editing Form Header, Title, and Description fields, customizing your logo, etc. You can choose to send email updates to the reporter for the following stages of the reported issue: trigger, acknowledged by internal team, and resolution.

Avoiding Spam on Webforms

One of the primary concerns when utilizing webforms for incident reporting is the potential for spam submissions. These unsolicited and irrelevant reports can overwhelm the incident management system, leading to wasted time and resources. To address this challenge and ensure that only legitimate client incidents are being recorded, a strategic approach is required.

The proposed solution tailors Webforms for Client Validation. This approach safeguards the incident reporting process while making it convenient for clients to report issues.

Suppression and Discard Rules

Two effective strategies stand out in managing incidents through webforms while minimizing spam:

(a) Suppression Rule: Filtering Out Unwanted Incidents

By implementing suppression rules, incidents originating from email addresses outside of the client domain are classified as suppressed. While these incidents are still logged in the incident management system, they are marked as suppressed and do not trigger notifications. This approach strikes a balance between logging all incidents for reference while preventing unnecessary notifications for non-client reports.

Read More: Keeping Stakeholders Notified of Incidents With Squadcast

(b) Merge Suppression with Discard Function: Minimizing Noise

For a more rigorous approach, combining the suppression rule with a discard function ensures that incidents not meeting the client domain criteria are not logged in the incident management system. This step minimizes noise by preventing the creation of irrelevant incidents altogether, sparing valuable time and effort that would otherwise be spent sifting through spam reports.

Read More: Kovai Reduced MTTA (Mean time to acknowledge) by 55% with Squadcast

Enabling Smooth Incident Reporting for Enhanced Customer Support

Squadcast Webforms offer MSPs a highly efficient alternative to traditional hotline numbers, streamlining incident reporting and enhancing the incident management process. By using Webforms, MSPs can achieve faster issue resolution, improved customer satisfaction, and seamless communication with customers.

As they continue to evolve in delivering top-notch support, Squadcast Webforms serve as a valuable tool, enabling them to handle incidents swiftly and effectively reducing your MTTA & MTTR. They can elevate your incident management capabilities and enhance customer support while also acting as a potential assistance to live On-Call Routing.

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Squadcast is a Reliability Workflow platform that integrates On-Call alerting and Incident Management along with SRE workflows in one offering. Designed for a zero-friction setup, ease of use and clean UI, it helps developers, SREs and On-Call teams proactively respond to outages and create a culture of learning and continuous improvement.