Onboarding a new customer in Autotask
When you win a new customer, you must transition the account from sales to service delivery and business administration. This process is different in each company, but will include some of the following steps:
All customers
Many Autotask customers assign a designated technician or a designated account team to provide service to a specific customer. This allows the team to become familiar with the technical environment and customer contacts, and streamlines service delivery.
NOTE If your company always sends the same technicians to a customer, we recommend that you add them to the account team. The account team has the same security permissions as the account manager, with access to all the organization's information. This allows you to limit the access of other technicians who do not need to interact with this customer.
To assign an account team:
- Open the Organization page and click Edit, or right-click a customer record in the table and select Edit Organization.
- Scroll to the Account Team field in the Associations section of the page and click the selector icon.
- Click all resources you want to make members of the account team. To remove somebody from the account team, clear the check box next to their name.
- Click Save & Close. The selected names appear in the box below.
- Click the X next to a name to remove that resource from the account team.
Your sales team will most likely interact with multiple contacts during the sales process. Once the deal is closed, you will often interface with only one person. To avoid spamming customer contacts with emails and notifications, we recommend that you identify a primary contact for the new customer.
The primary contact column can be selected on all contact tables, and be the designated recipient for workflow notifications.
To select a primary contact:
- On any contact table, right-click and select Edit Contact or open the Contact page and click Edit.
- In the Personal Information section of the page, check the box for Primary Contact.
- Click Save & Close.
If you want to provide your new customer with access to the Client Portal so they can submit tickets themselves, you must enable at least one resource.
All customers are enabled by default, so there is no need to do anything at the organization level, unless you also want to enable Taskfire.
To enable Client Portal for a customer contact:
- On any contact table, right-click and select Edit Contact or open the Contact page and click Edit.
- On the Client Portal tab, check the box for Activate Client Portal.
- Assign a Client Portal security level. Refer to Activating the Client Portal user account.
If you would like to set up an internal help desk for the customer, you must enable Taskfire. Refer to Configuring Taskfire for a client.
If the new customer is a sub-organization, franchise or customer location of an existing organization, you will probably want to direct bill the parent organization, and make sure that you can run reports that include parent and sub-organizations.
- For an overview of parent / sub-organization relationships, refer to Overview of organizations.
- For information on making the new customer a sub-organization, refer to The Sub-Organizations tab.
- To set the new organization up as the parent to existing organizations, refer to Parent Organization Name.
Your Billing Administrator will need to review the Invoice Settings for the new customer.
Be sure to review the invoice template for the customer, select a Tax Region and a Tax ID, and review the Billing Address. To make sure your invoices are paid promptly, be sure to populate the Attention field with the name of the customer's billing contact.
For information on completing the Invoice Settings page, refer to The Invoice settings tab and page.
Additional steps for onboarding a managed services client
For your Managed Services customers, you will most likely want to tie each supported device to a predefined service level. You may be able to tie a customer to an existing service level agreement that applies to multiple customers, or you may want to set up a customized SLA for the new customer.
For an overview of Service Level Agreements, refer to Introduction to service level management.
Managed Services customers are not billed for labor by the hour. Instead, you bill them for prearranged services that cover specific devices. The services are defined in Recurring Service contracts you must set up. Refer to Creating a contract.
To manage billing and service levels for devices in Autotask, some information about them must be transferred into Autotask.
Autotask has created a handful of Managed Services Extensions, and our partners have created many more RMM integrations with Autotask. For a complete list of RMM integrations, refer to Remote monitoring and management (RMM) integrations.
Additional steps for onboarding a break/fix client
Unless you always bill by the hour using standard rates, you will need to set up one or more billing contracts for your new Break / Fix customer. To find out about the right kind of contract for your business case, refer to Business cases and contract types. To learn how to create a new contract, refer to Creating a contract.
For your Break / Fix customers, you are still able to support service levels, but they are more likely ties to ticket issue types and sub-issue types, and they may be internal, rather than a contractual obligation. You may be able to tie a customer to an existing service level agreement that applies to multiple customers, or you may want to set up a customized SLA for the new customer.
For an overview of Service Level Agreements, refer to Introduction to service level management.