Is Ticketing Dead? Elevating MSP Client Experience | EP84

Justin Esgar (00:07):

Oh, what's up dude? The craziness all around work has been insane. I know it's been a while since you've been out of the game, but when you had clients that would want to work from let's say restricted countries, I'm putting restricted in quotes, what would you tell your customer? Because my short answer is no, just no, it doesn't matter who's president. It doesn't matter what's going on. Let's call a spade a spade. The answer is no. But there are people that have to work from those countries. What did you use to tell customers?

Eric Anthony (01:05):

Well, back in my day,

Justin Esgar (01:08):

I was going to make a grandpa yells at the cloud joke, and then you just decided to do it for me.

Eric Anthony (01:16):

Oh, so it wasn't as big a deal back then, right?

Justin Esgar (01:21):

You think?

Eric Anthony (01:24):

I think the problem still existed, but I think there were a couple of contributing factors. We didn't have as many threat actors back then. They weren't as organized. I think the internet was still a little bit loosey goosey, wild westy.

Justin Esgar (01:44):

They still called it ARPA net.

Eric Anthony (01:46):

Yeah, something like that. And I also don't think that as many people traveled worldwide like they do today and worked from so many different places as they do today.

Justin Esgar (01:59):

So

Eric Anthony (01:59):

I think it's a far bigger problem today as threat actors have become more prevalent and more sophisticated.

Justin Esgar (02:10):

I want to tell the person no. And the other thing is with all their data on the cloud, the person who's going to one of the restricted countries called me up and said, do we have VPN? And I was like, you don't need it. You don't have anything in the office to need a V VPN for all your stuff's in the cloud. And they were like, well, I'm going this place. And I was like, cool, have a great vacation. And so I texted their boss and I was like, no. And they were like, the person can't afford to be on vacation. They have to be working while they're there. And I remember even when my wife went to one of those restricted countries, I keep saying restricted companies, I don't know why, restricted countries. And she was in one of the designated, I don't remember they call it in China. She was in a designated zone that's allowed for Americans to travel to for work. She would try to FaceTime me and it was horrible. And I was like, stop calling me. I don't want to talk to you while you're there. But to do work and to connect to cloud-based services, which most likely are blocked Anyway,

(03:38):

I don't know what the right answer is. Installing one of those cheap Nord VPNs, your data is safe held in Jamaica. That's bullshit. So we're not going to do that. That's just as bad, right? No, I can't think of A good friend of mine the other day was talking about he had a client who was also going to one of these restricted countries and they wanted to bring their laptop. And my friend was like, no, don't bring your laptop. Here's a brand new laptop. It's air gapped. Just use this. And when you bring it back, don't turn it on. We're just going to put it right into the shredder.

Eric Anthony (04:20):

So I looked it up and basically the Internet's answer is to use A VPN. The problem is, is that most VPNs are blocked in China,

Justin Esgar (04:30):

Right? Right.

Eric Anthony (04:30):

So that's not an answer. And if it's not blocked, it's probably a sketchy one.

Justin Esgar (04:37):

So that's the thing they have to work, but I'm like, you're setting them up. They're not going to be able to is really what I think the problem here is they want to work, they want to be able to do stuff, but I feel like the desire is going to outweigh the technical risks. And I think that if I can try to get them to understand just how risky it is, they'll let up a little bit on this person has to work situation.

Eric Anthony (05:12):

This kind of goes back to the MFA question that we were talking about with Wayne the other week,

Justin Esgar (05:20):

Which I don't remember what I did yesterday, man.

Eric Anthony (05:25):

So this was the conversation where obviously everybody should be using MFA, but the only reason they don't is because of inconvenience.

Justin Esgar (05:33):

Oh yeah. Yeah. What's more important to you, your company's financial datas or this person working?

Eric Anthony (05:43):

Right?

Justin Esgar (05:45):

You know how we'll determine We'll use a Magic eight ball fit, an ear and ear, an ear.

Eric Anthony (05:56):

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Justin Esgar (06:24):

What's up everybody? Welcome to the All Things MSP podcast. I'm your host Justin Ascar. With me always is my good friend, podcast producer extraordinaire, Mr. Eric Anthony. Eric's clearly warmer than I am as I am in a hoodie and a beanie and I have a heater on under my desk and Eric's in a T-shirt and nothing else

Eric Anthony (06:42):

That you

Justin Esgar (06:43):

Can see.

Eric Anthony (06:45):

Well, because it is still relatively warm here. It's 63 degrees right now in Raleigh, North Carolina. So it is beautiful.

Justin Esgar (06:53):

It says it's 57 outside. But don't forget, my office is in the basement and it's getting cold at night. So the fridges here, it stays cold in here. Yeah. One of my projects for this winter is to work on insulating my office. That's the outside wall. You can't tell. Well, I guess you can see if you're looking at youtube.com/at all things msp, right? Where my hope sign is that's outside. There's a window there and as we know in it, sunlight is bad. What is that? The sun is a deadly laser. Alright. Anyway, yeah, so it's cold here, but you good?

Eric Anthony (07:32):

Yeah, yeah. Talking about basements though, I actually had a basement in Florida which literally had no windows.

Justin Esgar (07:39):

That's rare.

Eric Anthony (07:41):

Yes, very rare. It was actually built to be a bomb shelter. That's a whole different story that we can get into some other time.

Justin Esgar (07:47):

All things housing with Eric Anthony. And it's just, you just go through floor plans and side note, you ever look at that Reddit called Zillow Gone crazy or Gone Wild, I think it is. And it's just some of the most absolutely insane Zillow listings and you're like, what is this person doing? My favorite ones always, and then we'll get into the episode is anytime someone posts a picture of a house with a bathroom where the toilet is like two steps up and it's all carpeted, those are my favorite because that really just screams what were you doing? And it's the same expression I have for some of my clients. See, I tied it all together to computers. I just cringe.

(08:34):

Well, we have a from the group today, so let's do it. David writes, we've had an odd request from a client of ours. They're all odd, so we'll just bypass that one. They're in the home building industry but acquired a mortgage company. The client is now advising us that any of our staff that would have access to data under the mortgage company would need to go through new background check. The client is now asking for employee data for all employees that we have identifying as needing access to their data so the client can run their own background checks. We've indicated that we'll need to notify our staff of this upcoming background check and gave them the option to opt out if they should choose to do so. The client has advised us that any individuals who opt out cannot have access to their data in our systems, which means having us to change our processes company-wide for one client.

(09:34):

The client is also asking us to provide proof of or evidence that we've restricted the opting out employees from these systems. Our research shows that compliance items relating to mortgage companies apply to employees and not vendors. Has anyone else encountered anything like this? And if so, how do you do it? This is a really interesting one, and right away I'm saying a dump this client or B, call your lawyer. I worked for a mortgage company in a past life. I worked for a mortgage company and I can guarantee you they did not do background checks on these people. Not because of me, but the people who I used to work with were all criminals and fees. You know how I know this, the guy who ran that company got arrested for stock fraud after I left. So I'm plenty aware that they know this is a strange request though.

(10:22):

I will say, because not all of us do background checks on our employees. We're too small for that and actually not to bring it back to Apple, but to be a member of the A CN, the Apple Consultants Network and to add my team members to my location, apple does a background check on them as part of their, because once you're a consultant in the system, whether you're virtual or not, if you leave virtual, you're still technically a consultant in the system. So you can apply to be on your own or move around. So Apple does a background check on everybody also, which is why you have to be 18 or older to be a consultant. I mean I would, I would weigh the value of this client against the legal really is the way. That's what I'm initial blush. I'm thinking

Eric Anthony (11:18):

There's a lot of stuff to unpack with this one, right? First of all, there's the issue of them wanting to run the background checks. I mean to me, absolutely 100%. No,

(11:31):

Nobody gets access to your employee information outside of your organization unless it's the company that's providing your healthcare insurance, that kind of stuff. Clients absolutely not. I think my guess would be they're probably right about the compliance aspect of it and not requiring it of vendors. However, I could be wrong, and this is where you need to bring in an attorney who is versed in compliance who can actually answer that question for you because there probably are some requirements now in the financial industries around background checks and access to data and that doesn't surprise me at all. Now the other thing that I think is kind of another question in here, exactly what you talked about about how a lot of MSPs don't do background checks. It's probably coming. I mean, I think there's no question that as you start working for organizations that are going to have a higher level of compliance, it's just going to be table stakes that all of your employees have gone through background checks.

Justin Esgar (12:46):

It's actually in one of the SOC requirements is background checks.

Eric Anthony (12:50):

It doesn't surprise me at all. I think if most compliances are going to have something like that, now the question is going to be how does that happen? How are the records stored? How do you share that information with other entities to prove that all of your employees have had a background check without revealing all of their personal data? So there's a lot around that and it'd be interesting to have somebody on who's an expert in that because I think it's one of those things that doesn't get talked about enough, but probably should.

Justin Esgar (13:25):

I'm wondering if you mentioned not giving your client the information, which I a hundred percent agree with you, right? I'm wondering if David could run background checks on his own employees and provide that information to the client as, these are my employees names and they pass fail and that's it. What's the minimum threshold that this client will need? Because if the client pushes back and says, no, we need more, we have to run our own, that tells me there's something weird. The only other reason I would see this possibility would be is if the mortgage company had some association to a governmental, it was some sort of governmental, maybe it's a mortgage company that only does, what are they called? FHA loans for vets or something like that.

Eric Anthony (14:19):

F-H-A-N-B-A loans. Yeah.

Justin Esgar (14:20):

Yeah, right. If it's that there might be a legit reason. But on the surface here, this is no bueno.

Eric Anthony (14:31):

And

Justin Esgar (14:31):

I agree with you with the compliance thing. So some good responses here. There was a comment here. Adam writes a just my take, but I wouldn't make it optional. Our background checks that we do have never been sufficient to appease any, so we would just provide copies of the initial checks and annual updates. It keeps going on here, but David writes, we make it optional. Oh, we did make it optional for employees and a handful of the 50 or so employees have declined to have the background check done. Again, we do them upon employment. Now I'm going to not take the clients. I'm going to go into David. I'm like, David, if you have employees that don't want to take a background check, I would question that. I'm not questioning your employees, but I'm just like, if you said, Hey, we have a bunch of employees who don't want to get a background check done, what are they hiding? That's only because I'm a pessimistic bastard. That's just who I am. The glass is neither half full nor half empty. It's cracked and it's slowly leaking kind of level.

Eric Anthony (15:41):

So what I would add to that is that you also run into the issue of you can make this a new policy and you can do background checks of every new person you hired, but what about the people who are already working for you that that was not a requirement of when you hired them? That's where it could get a little sticky. And actually maybe we should get Brad Gross back on the podcast.

Justin Esgar (16:10):

He's got nothing better to do. Brad, are you listening? Hello? Are you there? Yeah, David, great question. A lot of thoughtful answers here. I would refer to a lawyer, call Brad and see what he thinks, but I also at the end of the day would question, is the juice worth the squeeze on this client? Is it worth it to change your processes or piss off all of your employees because this one client wants background checks? Or maybe truth be told, it could also be the mortgage company's way of getting rid of David and his company as the MSP without being direct since they were acquired, the mortgage company acquired. So there's a lot of different things here,

Eric Anthony (17:01):

And after that pessimistic view of it, I'll also say that it could also be an opportunity, right? This is something where now if you do this for this one mortgage company, you might be able to go out and get more mortgage companies that other MSPs are going to bypass. But to your point specifically, you should not be doing it if it doesn't fit in your processes, right? That's the point you're making. You have to intentionally be prepared to take on clients like that who have extra compliance requirements or you shouldn't do them.

Justin Esgar (17:39):

Well, a very thoughtful question, David, thanks so much for asking. If you want to be from the group, check out facebook.com/group/all things msp, and if the question's good enough, Eric, and I'll read it on air and then come up with some really good answers for you.

Eric Anthony (17:58):

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Justin Esgar (18:32):

Recordings like today. You know why?

Eric Anthony (18:35):

I guess I can guess why, but you yelled at me last time for telling it

Justin Esgar (18:39):

I did, which means the listeners know also we haven't guessed that. I love it when we have a guest. Let's bring him up. Mr. Matt Lin, co-founder, COO of Thread. Matt, what's going on man? How are you?

Matt Linn (18:52):

I'm great. I'm great. How are you guys doing?

Justin Esgar (18:55):

Well, we were talking about earlier, Eric's very warm and I'm very cold, so it's very reminiscent of Eric's lights in the background. So Matt, for those who don't know who you are, why don't you give everybody a two minute spiel? Who are you? What is Thread? And we were talking about this earlier in the show. You guys do background checks, right?

Matt Linn (19:13):

Yes, absolutely. But before we get to background checks, I'll give a little background on me. So in a prior life I had a 10 year career with an MSP named RFA in New York City. They focus primarily on hedge funds and private equity, so alternative asset managers. And I started on the compliance side, so documenting environments, B-C-D-R-S, consulting, all the stuff that I knew nothing about when I came out of college. So learned a lot there and then grew up through account management into operations. One of the teams that I ran was the PSA administration team. So I migrated us from an internally created ticketing system to ConnectWise manage and then ultimately went on to be promoted to chief of staff many years later. That's also where I met my co-founder at Thread. So that's where we saw the initial germ of the idea and got excited to build something.

Justin Esgar (20:11):

Awesome. And so tell everybody what is Thread in your own germs?

Matt Linn (20:16):

Yeah, so Thread's a service experience platform for MSPs. Really what we're doing is we're enabling providers to deliver an elevated level of service wherever their customers are. So Slack teams, their desktop could be a mobile device, could be their website intranet. Really the goal is to take friction out of the service experience for the customer and make it such that they get what they need wherever they are, right on time.

Justin Esgar (20:43):

I like that, the idea of being able to make, because a lot of us as MSPs tell people, alright, submit a ticket. And that's kind of what thread is Anti ticket.

Matt Linn (20:55):

Yeah, I think I'm contractually obligated to say death's the ticket.

Justin Esgar (20:59):

You should get a T-shirt, man. Put that up. I bet they do. I'm sure you, yeah, there it is. I can't even people who were listening to this in the car, I legit had no idea he was wearing this, but I'm assuming he's wearing a thread shirt.

Matt Linn (21:12):

Oh yeah.

Justin Esgar (21:12):

Hard to tell. So if we're not going to use tickets, how is an MSP going to be able to communicate? What does Thread do to help the MSP communicate with the customer and keep track of everything that's going on?

Matt Linn (21:24):

So the ticket though we are automating it to death, it's still in the background. You still need it as an audit trail. You still need it as proof of work and for billing. And that's what it was meant to be, right? It was meant to be an audit log of who asked for what, who did what, when, and how much we should bill for it. We believe the tickets were never meant for service and they were never meant as a channel for communicating. Certainly not today when people expect everything now and in real time and they expect that their experiences with their service providers will feel like what they have at home with consumer brands. And so that's what we're doing with Thread is we're tying all of the channels of communication together in a way that makes it easily integratable to your systems and easily automated or automateable.

Eric Anthony (22:17):

So I just thought about it this way. We used to treat phone calls as critical, but communicating especially ticket information is difficult via phone because there's a lot that can be lost in the translation between the phone receiver and the keyboard, but then we also lose stuff when it's by email and it becomes less personal and it becomes more slowed down, less critical to use my other word. This seems to bridge that gap to give them the criticality of the speed of the communication, but also give them not having to pick up the phone. So it gives them the benefits of being able to type it in directly and it not be translated, but also have the speed of a phone call.

Matt Linn (23:11):

That's right. And phones typically tend to be the most expensive channel for service on both sides, for the customer and for the MSP because you have at least one dedicated resource tied up for the entirety of the call on both sides. And so we believe chat gives you the best of all worlds, right? It's real time and it can be asynchronous when it's convenient to be. It could be real time when it's best to be depending on whatever the service request or incident is.

Justin Esgar (23:41):

So walk us through, oh look, you got thread message. Walk through what this would look like from both. I want to see from both sides. So a customer goes into their team Slack or Teams or whatever it is, and at IT help, everything's on fire. What's happening on the other side? Do I have to be in because I hate being in, I don't mind being in my own slacks. I don't want to be in other people's slacks.

Matt Linn (24:10):

Yeah, yeah. So we tie everything, oh sorry. We tie everything back into the providers teams environment or Slack environment, whatever that they're using. So you could feel it there, but also we do call it if Outlook and Slack had a baby, we have an inbox that's purpose built for technicians to be able to respond to chat specific service requests. It can be embedded into the PSA as well. So we have Autotask Insights and PSA pods that you can chat from in real time, which is interesting because the interface around it isn't real time. You have to refresh ConnectWise or Autotask to see what you've already done in the thread, but you have the real time interface embedded there. And so for the customer they say help, everything's on fire. The first thing that happens is it creates a request on the right service board, prioritizes it, categorizes it, and makes it available in the queue for the next available technician.

Justin Esgar (25:13):

And so that technician would pick it up from within ConnectWise or Autotask or any other PSA and respond to the ticket the way they know how, but it would come back as a chat to the person. So really the customer thinks they're getting real time chat when on the backend nothing really changes from the MSP person, correct?

Matt Linn (25:35):

Yeah, so we are big believers in meeting people where they work to use another marketing term that goes for both the technician and the end user. If the end user wants to operate only in teams, now they have a log of all their open service requests, recently closed ones, and they get notifications where they spend most of their time. And then same for the technician. If they're operating in the PSA, they see it's a chat request they can chat from in that interface.

Justin Esgar (26:07):

Right. That makes sense. You guys just released I think the new Magic ai, is that what we're calling it?

Matt Linn (26:14):

Yeah, magic agents actually. Magic

Justin Esgar (26:16):

Agents. Tell me how you're going to replace Pen and Teller. And

Matt Linn (26:23):

It's funny, actually our corporate entity name is Thread Magic Inc. And so we already have the threads with the integrated chat. We've actually been in generative AI since November of 2022. So right before chat, GPT was generally available. And it was funny, we brought the first use case, which was automated time entry to IT Nation Connect. That year people were like, oh, that's cool, but I don't necessarily get it. And then right after chat GBT came out and was broadly available, people were like, why doesn't it do this? Why doesn't it do this? So over here? Exactly. We'll get there, don't worry, we'll get there. So that's the assistive AI use cases, right? It's complimentary to humans. It helps them do their job more efficiently, better, faster, stronger, and more billable potentially. The a agentic use case is actually it's able to reason and it's able to respond based on intense and service catalog mappings that you feed it as the provider.

Justin Esgar (27:31):

So let's talk about that service catalog. I know we talked a little bit before we started recording here, but let's So way everyone else gets it. That service catalog, is that something that Thread is providing? Is that coming from within my own PSA? How am I building up that? Because an Apple consultant, someone's going to write in a question about Outlook. I don't want them being directed to some Microsoft document for Outlook for Windows because that doesn't help them. So what's feeding that catalog?

Matt Linn (27:59):

Yeah, so we do a job, basically we have an algorithm on the backend that looks at recent history in your PSA and says, based on what we can see, these are the highest volume requests. These are the ones that require approval from users and these are the ones that might be too complex for right now, but we'll address that later on down the way.

Justin Esgar (28:23):

So basically it always just says reboot your computer. If you look at the history of any ticket that we have, it's always did you restart first? And then if you did, then talk to us.

Matt Linn (28:33):

Yeah, right? Did you turn it on and off again?

Justin Esgar (28:36):

I do love the ticket that comes in that goes, I just restarted and all these things are still not working. And then we go look at their up time and it's like 700 days. I'm like, shit, what's wrong with you? So where do we see that going? It is not just the automatic thanks, we received your ticket, someone will get back to you. It literally can pull from previous information and try to provide an answer. Or is it going to go, Hey, we're trying to connect you with the next technician and five minutes later go, ah, no, it's available. Please leave your name and message at the tone.

Matt Linn (29:11):

Yeah, no. So that was probably V 0.1 of our product a couple of years ago, right? We'd say finding a technician, you got five minutes in the queue, something like that. And that was hard coded at first. So I had a couple people a little upset about having to wait more than five minutes, but understandably so,

Justin Esgar (29:31):

Right? Yeah, yeah, totally.

Matt Linn (29:32):

It's all about setting expectations and meeting set expectations, but that's why we're so excited about this new feature set. It's because you're exactly right, right? It's able to reason based on the context that we give it and the intents that it generates based on your specific customer's requests. And so it'll come pred with a list of questions to ask that it needs in order to pass the request off to a human to do the work. That's where we are today. And the not so distant future, we'll be able to handle full end-to-end use cases with first party solutions or third party integrations. And really what we're looking to do is take those high volume low complexity requests that everybody's always looking to automate and help them do. So.

Justin Esgar (30:27):

See, this is why we don't need background checks because we're just going to have an AI do all of our work and fire all of our employees,

Matt Linn (30:34):

At least AI background checks.

Eric Anthony (30:36):

So one of the things that really intrigues me about that though is that you're not just taking in what they told you and trying to guess at a solution, better guessing, using through ai,

Matt Linn (30:49):

But

Eric Anthony (30:49):

You're also triaging the solution. One of the biggest time consumers of that level one or that triage or service dispatch or whatever you want to call that position, is the back and forth asking all the right questions until you have all the information you need to actually work on the ticket. Is that part of what you're doing here?

Matt Linn (31:12):

100%. 100%.

(31:15):

And it's interesting back with the MSP that Mark, my co-founder and I met at, I think they had a service coordination team of about six globally. They did a follow the sun model and it was a pretty big desk, but that's a lot of overhead. And that overhead was there to make sure that that top of the funnel baseline information gathering was done and that the request was followed up on. So it doesn't make for a great experience, especially if it's the person's new and they got a partial piece of information and then the tech gets it and the tech's like, I don't have everything I need. So then they have to go back on the phone with the customer and really this is a super responsive, always on persistent way of getting to that baseline very, very quickly and then getting it to the right person to do it.

Justin Esgar (32:11):

That makes sense. I like that. So what PSAs right now are you integrating with?

Matt Linn (32:17):

So today we integrate with ConnectWise, PSA, Autotask and Halo PSA.

Justin Esgar (32:23):

Oh, we love that. See, there you go. Now I'm all smiles because you connect with the one that we're using. And what kind of pricing is an MSP going to look at for something like this?

Matt Linn (32:34):

So today, first of all, we price per customer and we only charge for the customers that you activate. And so we're not going to say, Hey, you have 200 accounts with active agreements in Halo. Now you have to pay us for all of 'em. No, we believe in making sure that it's not just overhead, that it's valuable and that it's out everywhere and you see value before we start capturing that value. And so today the pricing is, it's $17 per customer for the integrated chat with a $9 add-on for the AI feature set.

Justin Esgar (33:15):

I mean without the ai, I mean you're missing out on so much, right? Because you can alleviate, like we said earlier, you can alleviate so many of those intro person. I was thinking about a couple of tickets that have come in over the last couple of days to me and where that was, I had a client who emailed the other day, said they got some docking station, it was garbage, they bought another one and they're trying to get their second monitor work. And I was like, you know what? This is too complicated to do over email. Lemme just call you. So I

(33:45):

Call them and I'm having this conversation with them about second monitor and I know they have a laptop and in our mind second monitor is laptop plus one display. And in their mind it was laptop plus two extra displays. They actually had a third display and I had to explain to them on the phone, listen, we're cool, but have you ever talked to anyone else on my team say third display so they know what you're talking about? And then she was like, this isn't a monitor. I'm like, it's still a monitor, but all of that could have been avoided had the AI picked up on this. I can imagine the AI being like, hello Matt, did you mean second or third display? But that's just because I think all AI is al from Space Odyssey.

Eric Anthony (34:35):

Well, and that's an interesting thing because doing this with words is one thing, but to take your example Justin, it would be much better to be able to show that. Do you mean your setup looks like this and show a picture of it? Or does it look like this and have them radio button select the right one

Justin Esgar (34:59):

For those who are just looking and not watching on YouTube taking notes right now

Matt Linn (35:06):

Shamelessly as well. But yeah, another thing that we're working on is the ability to read your documentation for that customer and that site when the request is open. So that's another potential avenue to say which display is it are you referring to? And have them indicate,

Justin Esgar (35:25):

Right, because ideally someone would have a document with all the computers in this company are set up this way with this set up. And if anyone comes in with something else, question it against the document, which makes total sense. However, we all know the answer to that. We all know this is

Matt Linn (35:42):

Going, but you get the idea, right? It's totally agree with the images by the way, long-term roadmap, we're really excited about the opportunity to do something with reading screenshots and saying

Eric Anthony (35:58):

That would be the reverse of that. Yeah,

Matt Linn (36:00):

Exactly.

Justin Esgar (36:02):

Especially because this ticket had opened up with the user got a notification, it was actually on a pc nonetheless, a user got a notification saying something about the doc, she plugged in his U SB four, but the computer doesn't have USB four. The computer was self-aware that it knew it didn't have USB four, which I thought was really interesting. And she's like, I don't dunno what any of this means. I'm like, none of that matters we're dealing with here the wrong thing.

(36:25):

To be able to see that and have it understand, I mean if that's on your roadmap that that's a game changer in and of itself. I like the idea of being able to meet customers where they work. I've always been a big fan of that. I always tell MSP owners and consultants don't make it harder for the customer to find you. We internally at virtual would try not to do texting, but I'm just as bad as I will text a customer. We were talking during the cold open about a customer of mine that needs to go to a restricted country. And right before Eric and I got on the recording, I was texting with the owner being like, we need to talk about this. That could have been an email that should have been in a ticket that should have been recorded somewhere else, but no. But I know that customer will respond to texts faster and I need to meet them where they are. I should have however texted them from our main phone system and not my cell phone. But I do like the idea of meeting customers where they work because I do think that an MSP can provide a better level of service. Again, like you said earlier, service excellence, a better level of service and therefore create more stickiness with the customer. If you don't, you don't try to force customers to play in your very rigid sandbox,

(37:48):

I think is the best way to put that. Because with the exception of three consultants that I know about, no other consultant has been able to pull that off.

Matt Linn (37:59):

We liken it to portals, right? The last thing, especially if they're an office manager or they're the person who's responsible for the relationship with the provider, that might be different. They need contract information, they need to see what their agreement is, then potentially their SLAs, their order history. But if you're a rank and file user and you're having a problem, you just need help. You just want to ask for help when and where you need it and not have to go somewhere else. It would be like going to a pizza place, placing an order and then going home and waiting for it.

Justin Esgar (38:38):

That would be horrible. Exactly. That would be horrible. Well, on that horrible note, Matt, where can people find out about Thread?

Matt Linn (38:47):

Yeah, get thread.com. It's funny, probably the biggest spike of web traffic that we had last year was when Meadow launched Threads. Most downloads we've seen of all of our apps, but probably some disappointed folks, when

Justin Esgar (39:01):

You're going to end up in the same space that TeamViewer is. If anybody ever looks at TeamViewer on the app store and the Apple App store, it has a 0.0 0.3 rating and all the comments are like, this program tried to steal money from me because they think it's the program's fault and not the people using TV viewer to steal money. So you got to be careful with that. It's my one unsolicited piece of advice for you. Well Matt, thanks so much for being here, man. Everyone, check out get thread singular.com, check out thread, see how it integrates in with your PSA and this way you can make your service excellent, better. Eric, any final words before we sign off for today?

Eric Anthony (39:44):

The only thing is I want to know when I'm going to be able to take a picture of a server closet and have the AI tell me what to do to fix it,

Justin Esgar (39:52):

Right? If you want, I'll build you something right now. When you take a picture of a server closet, anytime you send it in, it'll just say, call Justin

Matt Linn (40:01):

Or have you heard of aws? There

Justin Esgar (40:04):

You go. Alright, well check us out. Thanks for listening and check us out at facebook.com/group/all things msp. See all of this in its high def glory over at youtube.com/at all things msp, follow us on all of your favorite podcasting tools, which you're using anyway because you're listening to us in your car. Now pull over and leave us a review. We're looking for those. Anyone who leaves a review, Eric will send a sticker. I just made that up, but I'm sure it'll happen,

Eric Anthony (40:26):

But I will.

Justin Esgar (40:27):

But he will. That's Eric, that's Matt. I'm Justin. Bye.

Eric Anthony (40:31):

Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow us on Facebook, but better yet, go ahead and join the Facebook group. You can also follow us on Instagram if that's your thing. And make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel at all things MSP to catch us in all of our video glory. And last but certainly not least, if LinkedIn is your thing, you can follow us there as well. And a special thank you to our premier sponsors Super Ops Move Bot goes into Easy DMAC and comtech and we also want to thank our vendor sponsors. The All Things MSP podcast is a biz POW LLC production.