Chatbots could help reduce the customer service burden
Customer service is a key part of running any business, but SMBs struggle with the cost of hiring and training customer service reps. It’s expensive to find quality employees who understand both the products and the business and can act...
Conversation hijacking emerges as a cybersecurity threat
Recent research by Barracuda Networks highlights the growing dangers of “conversation hijacking.” According to the research, an analysis of approximately 500,000 monthly email attacks shows a 400 percent increase in these types of attacks. There were approximately 500 incidents in...
Using the “no” as an opportunity, not a dead end, during sales
The first real sales training I received was when I was working for Tony Robbins as a rep selling his Personal Power and Power to Influence courses. It was a great experience, to say the least. Tony taught his reps...
Ask an MSP Expert: How can my MSP balance new and old marketing strategies?
Q: As we start the new year, I am hearing about new technologies and strategies that my MSP can utilize in its marketing. Which ones should I add to my MSP’s marketing efforts and how do I balance using these...
Sales & Marketing
Want your MSP website to soar? Avoid these three design pitfalls
While I’ve always thought it’s important to look forward, it can also be valuable to look backwards too, to see exactly how far you’ve come. That’s exactly what I did when I was looking over some of my notes and...
Get more appointments with these easy LinkedIn tips
If I told you there was a tool that could increase your sales rep’s performance by 100 percent or more, would you ask about it? Of course! But, the name of the tool won’t surprise you, simply because you use...
Tech Time Warp: Remembering the commercials of the “Dot-Com” Bowl
As we await the premiere of Facebook’s first Super Bowl commercial — a 60-second feel-good spot featuring Chris Rock and promoting the benefits of Groups — it’s easy to get nostalgic about a time 20 years ago when the internet...
Security
Tech Time Warp: The arrest of hacker Kevin Mitnick
The story of the man who calls himself the “world’s most famous hacker” contains a moral: It’s often the human element, not the high-tech, that allows intrusion into the most secure of systems — and allows hackers to exist in...
Threat of toll fraud emerges
MSPs have an increasing amount of cyber turf to defend with the rapid proliferation of IoT devices and interconnected networks. Add to the mix the arsenal of weapons the bad guys have, and an MSP could be forgiven for overlooking...
Ask an MSP Expert: How can I make sure my customers are secure online?
Q: One of my customers recently fell victim to a suspicious download from a fraudulent website. How can I prevent this in the future? Attacks through websites are not uncommon. As cybercriminals become more sophisticated with attack vectors such as drive-by downloads and malvertising,...
Better Business
Compliance mandates provide a boon to MSPs
Most business executives are not especially fond of regulations. However, it turns out the need to comply with a myriad of regulations has been something of a boon to managed service providers (MSPs). A survey of 50 MSPs conducted by...
Talent crunch gets tighter as IT salaries rose sharply in 2019
Most IT service providers are competing against much larger organizations for a very finite amount of IT talent. The trouble is finding and retaining IT talent keeps getting more expensive. The annual free global survey of 12,200 IT professionals published...
MSP Metric: Help desk ticket differential (+/-)
One of the biggest struggles in our company’s early years of selling managed services was in the control of ticket flow through our Help Desk. For a while, it appeared that the amount of tickets in our queue kept growing...
Tech Insight
Free code education resources could help you add value for clients
MSPs are probably best known for acting as the de facto IT departments for small to medium sized businesses. You deal with tasks like software updates, backups, and making sure the IT lights stay on, but there are ways for...
Don’t reinvent the wheel
Being an MSP means that you can provide services to your customers where you retain far more control than if you were an independent software vendor (ISV). ISVs who have on-premise software must provide support for implementations across a wide...
Ask an MSP Expert: How do I track technicians without creating an atmosphere of mistrust?
Q: My technicians monitor massive amounts of sensitive data and have access to multiple high-security clearance networks. How can I track them without creating an atmosphere of mistrust? MSP technicians are the guardians of the galaxy when it comes to...