Hello,
My company (a small company in Puerto Rico with 5 technicians) is currently in the process of transitioning from a traditional VAR and break-fix support model to an MSP model. Our support offerings are a bit different than others, since we have customers on both models. This has made the task of finding a good service desk application quite daunting.
Our Support Offerings
We offer support on two models. Our break/fix customers pre-purchase service hours in packs. These packs expire when all hours are consumed or one year after purchase, whatever happens first. If these customers go over their hours, or their pack expires, they have to purchase another pack before service continues. We strongly try to avoid overages with these customers.
On the other hand, our MSP customers have a fixed set of services and hours they can consume every month for a flat fee. Anything out of the scope of these hours/services is billed separately. Overages are no big deal with these customers, as they can simply be included in their monthly billing.
What we're looking for
We'd like to be able to represent our customers' allowed services and hours in our service desk app. We know Jira does time tracking, but we're wondering if through some add-ins we'd be able to automatically deduct the time spent on tickets from a customer's hour pack/monthly allotment. For break/fix customers, this is as simple as deducting the time spent on tickets from the allotment. For MSP customers, there also needs to be a check regarding what the customer is requesting. Services covered in the MSP agreement for a particular customer are charged against their allotment. For services not covered, hours should be billed separately (though an acceptable workaround would be to simply restrict MSP customers from creating requests for services not covered in their agreement).
We'd like to be able to choose which customers can/cannot have tickets created even when they're over their allotment. Also, we'd like to be able to automate reports or notifications as follows:
- Notify user and customers when a break/fix customer is close to pack expiration (either due to consumption or passing of time)
- Automate monthly billing reports for MSP customers
Other features, like a knowledgebase, issue routing automation, CMDB, ERP integrations, CRM integrations, etc. are all "would be nice", but not crucial
What we've looked at
We've looked at simple help desk solutions, like Freshdesk. They usually can't handle our support offerings for break/fix customers. We've looked at more robust solutions, like Solarwinds MSP Manager. Once again, the solution couldn't handle our offerings for break/fix customers. We looked at ManageEngine, which actually does meet all our requirements. However, it only does so in their Enterprise edition, which (with implementation fees) skyrockets to some $10k in initial fees and $5k in subsequent annual subscriptions. We're trying to find anything that might be anywhere below that price region, but we do understand we have some unconventional and kind of complex needs.
We had a look a Jira, but a lot of functionality is provided by add-ons, and we're a bit overwhelmed with where to look for answers. Is the scenario outlined above possible in Jira with add-ons? Does Atlassian offer some kind of sales support? Are there Atlassian partners that can help with implementation and sales questions? Has anyone here had any experience with similar scenarios?
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