Giant Rocketship: Smarter Ticketing (EP 823)

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers, where we share product stories and tips to help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. I think we're going to have a good show today, folks. I have a guest returning.

You heard him back in the days of the 2024 Pitch It, Giant Rocketship is an automation platform designed specifically for managed service providers to streamline and optimize help desk operations. If you went to, let's see, I think it was DattoCon at the end of 2024, he had these little rocket ship things that they were flying around the conference that, they got to be a little annoying, but Dustin Puryear of Giant Rocketship is with me. Dustin, how are you?

[Dustin Puryear]
Well, I have bad news for you, Marv.

[Uncle Marv]
You have more of those?

[Dustin Puryear]
I have boxes of those. And now that I know it kind of got irritating for you, I'm not only, and I'm sure it's just because, I mean, we would, we would, we would shoot them, but all the attendees started shooting them as well. And now when I see you, it's going to be a full on assault.

So you better run.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So it's going to be like an MSP game of tag in the vendor hall, right?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's, that's a positive spin on it.

The other thing is you're going to be running for your life from little Styrofoam rockets, but it's okay.

[Uncle Marv]
You know what you should do? You should do like a version of dodge ball and get two sides and, you know, have the line in the middle where people try to hit each other.

[Dustin Puryear]
That's actually a great idea, but we're going to put a wrench in everyone, because if you can dodge a wrench, tell me you've seen the movie, Marv.

[Uncle Marv]
What are you talking about?

[Dustin Puryear]
Oh my God, Marv, that's a famous joke. If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. That's from the movie Dodgeball.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh, I didn't see that because...

[Dustin Puryear]
Oh my God, Marv.

[Uncle Marv]
What's that guy's name?

[Dustin Puryear]
Cut the tape. Cut the tape. Let's start this over.

[Uncle Marv]
What's that guy's name? I just... There are some actors where I'm like, no, I'm not going to see that.

[Dustin Puryear]
Is that Ben Stiller?

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah.

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
I just, I can't.

[Dustin Puryear]
I can tell you 90% of people that are going to listen to this know exactly what I was saying.

[Uncle Marv]
Of course. And listen, I have it all the times with Star Wars because, you know, 90% of techs watch and love Star Wars. I didn't.

[Dustin Puryear]
Just remember, Star Wars is about magic and laser swords.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah.

[Dustin Puryear]
You remember those two things, you're fine.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. And I don't care for either of those things. All right.

[Dustin Puryear]
We have topics. I totally forgot. We have a focus here.

[Uncle Marv]
We do. We do. But let me first start with this because you're also going to, you know, make comments about me ghosting you.

You recently were down here in Florida for MSP Geek Con and normally I tell people if it's in Florida, I will be there. However, I've been in the midst of three client moves in four weeks and MSP Geek Con was literally at the end of my last move and it got to Sunday and I said, you know what, I, I just can't. I got to get home.

Uh, and you were waiting for me to call out on Monday and come see you guys. First of all, sorry, I didn't make it. But second of all, I heard it was a great event.

Tell me about that.

[Dustin Puryear]
Real quick for everybody listening. What he means is he sent me a text Monday at night and said, sorry, I can't make it busy. And it was a picture of you drinking a pina colada on a beach.

So if that's how you want to spend this, that's totally fine. I hope, I hope he took the umbrella out first. Um, MSP Geek Con was fantastic.

It was actually our first, I've never been as an attendee. Um, quick reminder, I did start giant rocket school about two years ago, but we only really got going last year and I sold my MSP last year. So even though it had started while I was still at MSP, I had never been, I love the pictures and I know a lot of people that went, so I was kind of excited.

We went, I thought it was fantastic. It's, it has a good educational track, but it's laid back compared to like the big vendor driven conferences. You have a much broader mix of attendees.

It's not just like MSP owners and service managers, a lot of technicians, engineering level people. I thought it was really good and it was kind of a very comfortable setting. I highly recommend if you haven't been to MSP Geek Con that you go.

It's, it was awesome.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, I will make it one of my missions to attend next year and that will be, let's see, this is, this was the third one this year. So yeah, I got to make it before they get to five, especially if they're going to stay in Orlando. Are they staying in Orlando?

[Dustin Puryear]
That's, you're asking the great questions and I don't have the answer, but I like these questions.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. All right. Um, now, so you mentioned the difference in conferences, of course the big conferences, all the big cons, you know, are, they're usually a partner love fest.

They usually use that time to make big old announcements about anything. Did you guys go as a vendor? Did you make any announcements, any new improvements in Giant Rocketship?

[Dustin Puryear]
Great question. We went as a vendor. We did have a booth, um, which was nice cause we got to eat our dinner and lunch a little bit earlier than the other attendees and that's really what it's about.

Um, but, uh, yeah, like I will say it must be, GeekCon is not where you make big announcements. Um, it's not really set up for that. Uh, it's, again, it's really more of a, uh, you know, shaking hands and get to know your existing customers and prospects and just talking.

But, um, in terms of announcement, we've had some really powerful technology, uh, enhancements. One thing that I think is, is it's a huge difference here between the way we work and some other scheduling and project management, ticket management solutions is we, we really, we spun up this, this concept that we struggled with at my MSP, which is prioritized appointments. And it took actually a good bit of work to make this happen.

What we realized was that MSPs are lying to themselves constantly, which is that ticket priorities and SLAs, um, drive all of their behavior, but it doesn't because if I have a recurring ticket that is high priority and I have a VIP that has a medium priority ticket, then who's going to get the love, the VIP on the medium priority ticket. So we realized that the AI not only has to consider the SLA and priority of the ticket, but they also have to look at who's the ticket going to be dealing with and prioritize the appointment. Also based on that, that's been a huge game changer for us.

[Uncle Marv]
Interesting. So it sounds like you've been able to find a way to do this, you know, pumpkin plan of ticket so that the, you know, the big, the big ticket people get taken care of first, right?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah. If you remember Giant Rock Ship or Rock Ship, the application, it fully automates ticket assignment, dispatch and scheduling. So not only does it make sure that the tickets get the right technician, but it even tells the technician when to do the work.

And so once we rolled this technology out, it had a huge impact on making sure technicians were not just focused on SLAs, but, but making sure that the MSP doesn't get fired by VIP because they're not really working tickets in the most account management like focused way. Right. So it's been a big deal for our customers.

[Uncle Marv]
So here's the question I have. Have you had MSPs reach back out and say, Hey, we love what you're doing, but it's prioritizing wrong. How do you, how do MSPs adjust that?

[Dustin Puryear]
If in their mind, the AI control, they have control over it.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[Dustin Puryear]
So, so they set the rules for how it works. And so they just need to go change how the rules are being applied. But honestly, I haven't had any customers who really have to struggle with it because it's once you, once you deploy this concept that the ticket priority isn't a hundred percent.

Again, if you have a recurring ticket that's high priority and a customer or VIP that's meeting priority ticket, that's not the reality of how people operate. Even though on the service part, that's how it's supposed to look. But once you set up the rules, it, it governs itself and it's using your business processes.

So we're happy to help customers if they need to do some fine tuning. But we've done it where it's kind of just obvious when you set it up, how to do it.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. So I remember when we, when we first talked last year, we talked about this whole idea of, of, you know, ticket flow management and stuff. And the idea, I don't know if you had started it or if you've are going to move into this idea of help desk automation, where not only can you prioritize tickets, but you can help automate some of the resolutions and stuff like that.

Where are you guys in that spectrum?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah, we haven't actually gone too far down that rabbit hole. One, there's already some players out there and Rocketship currently is kind of a one and only. There's really no competitors for what we're doing.

And so strategically, this is interesting where, you know, we have conversations with our board of advisors and our customers and we think, okay, where can we, where can we make a difference versus where are we just trying to check boxes? And I feel like that's an area where there's a lot of vendors in the space and, you know, I love all these people, but sometimes I feel like they're just trying to have the same solution as somebody else, but maybe it's a nickel cheaper. And I just don't see where that brings value to the industry.

So for us, we really look strategically, like is this new feature solving a problem that maybe the help desk platform already solves? Or there's already 14 vendors out there that solve this problem. And if so, we're kind of just not touching it.

And I will tell you, adding, you know, suggested resolutions, that's going to stay on our potential roadmap. But I do wonder if we're just trying to reproduce something that's already been worked on. So I don't have a firm answer for you on that.

We're really still, we're really just talking to our customers more than anything to see really where are we going to provide the most value to them? And right now it's on who's doing the work? Why are we doing the work?

When are we going to do the work? That's something that there's like no products here that focus on the whole front 80% of the ticket. Everybody wants to solve the last 20% of the ticket.

What's the resolution of that?

[Uncle Marv]
Right. Okay. I was trying to bait you into a hot topic there about help desk automation and, you know, how far does it go?

Because, you know, a lot of technicians are worried that AI will take their jobs. Yeah.

[Dustin Puryear]
So I was bobbing and weaving, didn't even realize it.

[Uncle Marv]
I know, you were doing the rope-a-dope.

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But honestly, I just have to be strategic about what we're trying to do versus not. So it's interesting you say that.

So I like this concept of this hybrid intelligence. So it's not human intelligence. It's not AI intelligence.

Oh, I guess I'm saying intelligence twice. It's not AI, but it's hybrid intelligence. The reality is, you know, technicians have the role and there's just going to be places where AI is just not going to provide the best solution, particularly when it gets to tier two, tier three.

Password resets, I think that tier, that's the tier that needs to probably, that type of resolution, that's probably the most at risk over the next couple of years. But really getting deep into something troubleshooting, I think it's going to be around for a while. At the same time, Rocketship can work with other AI.

We have more and more customers integrating Rocketship with Roost, for example. In fact, I need to, they were talking to us about doing a co-webinar. And so we definitely play with these other products.

But yeah, I would say Rocketship is really about elevating people in your organization. And so we're not really out there trying to replace a million people. I guess we have a different take on it.

Hybrid intelligence. Let's go with that.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. I'll let you off the hook there. You went ahead and mentioned integrations.

So I know, you know, going through the ConnectWise PitchIT, you know, you were doing a lot of stuff there. You were also integrated with Autotask, right?

[Dustin Puryear]
Correct. And then our next one is going to be Halo.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[Dustin Puryear]
And I'll kind of give you a bird's eye. So down the road, right now we're focused exclusively on MSP help desk platforms. And we're doing a one-to-one.

We sell to the MSP. But our end game here is when we integrate with the Asanas, the Mondays, the Trello’s, the Microsoft projects. Our MSPs will suddenly be able to resell rocket ships to their own customers and automate the project and the business management needs in those products.

And so really that's where we're headed, which is how do we not just empower the MSP to do more with the staff they have? But how do we enable them down the road to have a new profit for our revenue center, which is automation of middle management for our own customers?

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So you mentioned a lot of products there. Some of them are what I would consider on the periphery of the MSP space, even though they're there like the Asanas.

When you're talking about all these integrations, I know that with other vendors, you know, there is a struggle point trying to integrate with everyone. What have you experienced in doing these integrations?

[Dustin Puryear]
It's tough. I mean, it is extremely tough. I think what people don't understand is that these products, yeah, they all have APIs, but in many ways they are fundamentally different in how they see the universe, right?

So Autotask and ConnectWise both have tickets and tasks and projects and accounts. But a lot of the ways that they manage that internal data and the way that that data links to itself is completely different. And so you can't just say, hey, I'm going to speak to this endpoint or that endpoint.

You have to have a lot of business logic in your application to account for these differences. And I didn't realize that because I was the original developer when we did Autotask. Now I have somebody on the ConnectWise side who I was just going to use for general backend stuff, but I took them from the team and I said, no, you're going to be the integration person.

You can imagine how the developers felt about losing one of their people just to be focused on one task. But that's how big of the task it is, which is integrating with these other platforms. It is a huge lift, and we've really had to learn that.

And I'll tell you, I know LionGuard and all these other platforms, it's a lot of work for these guys. They spend a lot of money integrating with all these different systems, a lot more than people realize.

[Uncle Marv]
So you mentioned LionGuard. So I've recently partnered up with LionGuard and I've used several of their integrations. I will say this, yes, they must spend a lot and it must be very hard to integrate with so many different platforms because there are sometimes where I'm like, well, this seems to be lacking in this one little area or reporting.

And when I've talked to people, they've said pretty much what you said, is that just because it has an open API doesn't mean that it's 100% compatible with what you're trying to do.

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah, I'll talk dev speak all day long. But again, I pulled one of the back-end developers off the back-end team just to focus on integrations. That's how big of a deal it is for us.

And LionGuard produces, we were a LionGuard customer when I was at MSP. I thought it was a phenomenal product. But you're really paying all that money for the fact that they give you one pane of glass for all these different endpoints.

And that's really worth a huge amount of value for what LionGuard is. And you're correct that when you integrate with these endpoints, sometimes you just don't have access to things that you can get to inside the application. But the API just lacks, it's lacking these key features.

And so it can be a real struggle. Sometimes you just want to pull your hair out. Sometimes you just make up stuff.

You just like, let's glue together some things and make it behave as much as we possibly can the way we want it to.

[Uncle Marv]
Can I ask you to take a little side trip with me and do a little deeper explanation of API? Because I think most of us, we know the term. We suspect that it just means that it's an open gate into everything.

But that's not the case. I mean, what is API really when it comes to each vendor product?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah, so API, Application Programming Interface, is just a set of promises that you're given when you communicate to something. 99% of the time it's going to be over REST, which is just, you know, it's just an HTTP protocol. There's other ones like SOAP and other things.

But most of the time you're given this URL and you're told to authenticate using some model. It just varies. And then you're given this spec, this set of promises that says, if you send the number one to this URL, we will send you back the letter A.

And if you send a query for, find all assets that start with the letter A, then we will send you a set of SKUs or something for that. It's just a set of promises and language between the two parties. And there's a consumer and a producer.

And so for us, generally, we're going to be the consumer of data from an Autotask or Connectwise or a Halo. But it's just a set of grammar and vocabulary between you and one of these vendors. I don't know if that helped or hurt that explanation.

[Uncle Marv]
I'm still lost, but it does actually explain it a little more. Because you're right. Everybody trying to understand just because you have access to an API, being able to ask the right query to get the right response has got to be part of that engineering.

[Dustin Puryear]
A lot of times the API doesn't have the same support for features that the internal app does. So let's talk about Autotask. In Autotask, I can use rich text to create a ticket.

I can have graphics and ponies and bold colors in my ticket. The API only lets you send plain text for the ticket. So you can't create rich text tickets using the API.

And so that's a situation where if you're inside the application, you have enhanced features that you do not have via the API. And then there's times you're inside of an application that you are not given the same ability to query things. So you might be able to query a search tool in ConnectWise that you cannot easily do via the API.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. We just went down a tech rabbit hole, but I'm sure that half my audience loves it and half are like, what are you talking about? But I wanted to at least get a little bit of that because, again, we always talk about it, but I don't think a lot of the MSPs, a lot of the listeners actually understand the true nature of working with an API.

So let's get back to Giant Rocketship. Is there any what I would call moonshot ideas, anything that you've got out there that you're reaching for, striving for, that you have as the next milestone as to what you guys are going to do?

[Dustin Puryear]
We have a couple of milestones. This is not a moonshot, but I'll give you some tactical milestones, and then I'll kind of reiterate something I mentioned earlier, which is the moonshot. So in terms of some of the tactical updates that we have coming out, which is one is going to be a rebalancing feature, and this is done in all MSPs, but people don't think about how would I automate this.

A rebalance is, let's say that Rocket Ship or by hand, right, you've got five people and you're tier one, and always, Marvin, always there will be techs that work faster than another tech. That's always a situation where you have your A plus and then you have your B plus players, and whether it's Rocket Ship or your service manager, you're going to look at that board and you feel like, oh, man, the reality is that my A player needs more work. They're going idle, and then my B player is behind, or maybe they just got caught up on a critical ticket.

Who knows? Well, in the past, Rocket Ship would do that dispatching based on workload, and it would get everybody balanced, but then afterwards, after a couple of days, that balance could be lost, or if your service manager is doing it. With rebalancing, Rocket Ship will constantly monitor your staff and rebalance tickets automatically without being asked.

You have to enable this feature, but basically it ensures that your staff's always fully deployed and you don't have some staff that's idle and some staff that's overworked.

[Uncle Marv]
Is some of that because of the nature of the ticket, where high priority tickets get assigned one way, high, what's the right word? Not high volume, but high activity. So, for instance, if one of the people works fast because they can just knock out a certain type of ticket, as opposed to somebody who gets stuck on a task that should be elevated, does that make sense?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah, well, it can monitor all that. Now, Rocket Ship has enough knowledge that it understands different teams and tiers. So, it will automatically say, oh, password resets goes to this team, and then all Meraki network stuff goes to my network group.

So, it will already break up work like that, and then it will break it up based on tiers. But now it can look at the tier and understand, hey, look, the reality is that Susan is outperforming Bill. Like, Susan's just chilling in it today.

Well, Rocket Ship will watch those people and say, oh, interesting, Bill's not having a good day today. It's just, he's not doing well. And so, it will start pulling unworked tickets automatically that it had given to Bill before and then start feeding it to Susan and get her queue back full because she's just killing it for the day.

And so, it's watching these different cadences happening. And maybe next week it flips, and Bill's just really killing it. And it starts pulling tickets from Joseph and giving them to Bill.

It's just dynamic, and so we call it just the act of rebalancing.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, so I have a question now that comes out of the days when I used to work with body shops, because they would do that with their mechanics, their painters and stuff, and they would bill based on the number of estimated hours that something was supposed to take. So, if a paint job was supposed to take four hours, but a tech knocked it out in two, they still got credit for the four hours. So, since I don't have any full-time technicians that work with me, I don't manage tickets in the same way that other companies would.

But do MSPs also manage that way, where they get credit based on the number of tickets, and it's just, if somebody constantly knocks out more tickets, they get more credit? Does that make sense?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah, I mean, a lot of PSAs even have a billing contract for that, which is a per-ticket contract. I know Autotask, Fisher ConnectWise has it. I think Halo and some others have it.

That billing model is most common when you're doing an outsourced Tier 1 support, and maybe your hospital has outsourced password resets to you. That most often is done on a per-ticket basis, so it's basically per call. And in that situation, you make more profit by Rocketship rebalancing it, because you're able to close more tickets.

It's not just about the work in that situation. So absolutely, that does happen.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, but if Billy's having a bad day, he's creating and closing less tickets, he's going to get dinged for that day if he's having a bad day.

[Dustin Puryear]
But isn't that correct?

[Uncle Marv]
I don't know. What if he's having a bad day because he's working with somebody who can't figure out how to restart their computer?

[Dustin Puryear]
True, but then I think the counter-argument to that is if he's taking a long time with customer A, should customer B suffer because he hasn't gotten to their ticket?

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[Dustin Puryear]
So if you look strategically at the help desk, at an individual level, maybe that tech is like, oh man, I'm getting tickets pulled from me. But at a help desk level, what's healthy is volume, pushing those tickets through the help desk and not having to micromanage every technician every five seconds. Just letting the tickets move themselves so you're always optimized.

You're always pushing work through. And the other thing is rocket ship is really good about making sure the tech gets, hey, look, I got a lot done today. I got some work done today.

Because what I learned when I owned my MSP is that technicians don't want to feel like they're a gerbil on a wheel. They just go in a circle all the time. They want to feel like they're accomplishing things.

And so that's another part of how rocket ship presents work is the technician can kind of get the reward of closing everything out.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So in my head, I'm thinking about an email that I had to deal with this morning from TJ, one of the tech juniors at a co-managed site. And I don't know how long he worked on it before he sent me the email claiming that he could not access an IP address.

And of course I had to go figure out what IP address it was. He was trying to get access to a copier. And it was one of those deals where I went in and I checked it.

Yes, there was no access to it. And all I did was suggest to him, did you try powering down the copier? And that would be an example of, did I really have to be involved with that?

And why couldn't TJ take that next step to check it? But that's the reason he's TJ.

[Dustin Puryear]
Yes, that's TJ. That's also the problem. I think that's a quick aside for I think the struggle with AI responses is going to be people are already numb to automated checklists.

This is I think an example where AI you would say, oh this is going to help us. I would caution and say maybe not. Imagine if you said, hey look I'm going to have AI respond to this initial ticket from TJ and AI would be like, it was going to send him 10 things he should check.

We all know he's not going to do it. We all know he's not going to do it. He's not going to go through those 10 things.

Sometimes a human being when a human responds and we all know when a human responds and says, hey did you check the power? That's a motivator of a little bit of shaming. And I think that's an interesting use case of I don't know that AI is going to be good in that situation because I can promise you TJ would ignore that list and say, yeah I tried all that.

I think it's interesting how AI plays out and again I'm not an AI hater we use AI. I just feel like you have to be mindful of how you're using it and you also have to understand that there's always going to be pushback from humans on some of what AI does because you can feel it. You can feel the AI and the response and the instructions.

[Uncle Marv]
Well my first thought is I could have sent him a list of stuff to check and he would have just responded back, yeah I did that already. Although I can look in my monitoring and see, no that copier has been up for 15 days straight. You didn't shut it down.

That's the next step there.

[Dustin Puryear]
That's TJ.

[Uncle Marv]
That's TJ. I'm going to make a little shirt that says it.

[Dustin Puryear]
No I think we should use it for the rest of the podcast. Just like, oh that's the TJ man.

[Uncle Marv]
Alright Dustin so when we first were talking about coming back and doing this show I came up with this idea and I think you helped me of I'm going to start adding this concept of hot topics to my show. And just to let you know how far I've gotten so I have actually gone ahead and developed my wheel of hot topics.

[Dustin Puryear]
We did talk about this.

[Uncle Marv]
Yes we did. So I'm going to populate that wheel with questions that either I get questions that I see out on social media and current events that are going on and it'll just be a wheel of hot topics and then I would spin the wheel and whatever comes up would be the thing that we talk about.

[Dustin Puryear]
Are you going to do a theme song like the wheel of hot topics?

[Uncle Marv]
You know what I'm going to do is I'm going to probably try to find a way to come up with do you know the comedian Jim Gaffigan?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah I just watched him the other day.

[Uncle Marv]
I don't remember how long ago it was but what really got us hooked on him was when he was doing that hot pocket. That was his whole thing. So I was thinking of oh I can get a voice like his and be like hot topic.

[Dustin Puryear]
I think it's good. Also for those not familiar with him that guy has the whitest skin of anybody I've ever seen in my life. That's half of his gimmick right there.

[Uncle Marv]
Jim Gaffigan. Look him up. Hot topics will be coming up.

Let me just ask you do you have any hot topics that are burning inside of you that you want to get out or annoying you today or yesterday?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah I have an idea for you real quick though on the hot topics. You can have a little logo for it on a wheel but maybe get the little hot pocket outline and do hot topics but inside of that little hot pocket holder. I think that would be a hilarious little logo for this section of the podcast heads up.

I'll just use the one I just came up with. I think a hot topic is when does AI hurt your customer relationships? It's always the positive and I was thinking about that just because we were just talking about it and again I have to preface we use it.

I know I don't want to come across as a hypocrite. AI has got some great features but I just I worry sometimes that people are going to damage relationships if they don't use it wisely. And so for me the hot topic would be when is AI a bad deal for the customer?

[Uncle Marv]
Interesting. Did you already have some thoughts or is that just a question that you want me to answer for you?

[Dustin Puryear]
Oh man I didn't know I was going to have to answer that. Yeah I literally just came up with a little response.

[Uncle Marv]
Here's the thing. I can tell you that AI for me is basically the next step when it comes to automation that we've already been doing. We've already been trying to script everything.

We've already been trying to do this auto closing of tickets. AI is just going to be the next step in removing that human touch that personalization because right now at least for me a lot of my customers still like me because when they call first of all they can call. There are a lot of MSPs that don't allow customers to call.

You have to submit a ticket. Most of my customers they still want to be able to pick up the phone call and talk to somebody. And I've got Kim here at the office that will answer the phone if I'm not available.

She'll talk to them. She'll chat with them. They of course always do you know how you're doing which I don't always do but that's the first thing I see is that AI may take that away even though it may try where those bots that pop up in the lower right hand corner of your website and be like how are you today and I'm like shut up.

Answer my question. But at the same time when I do want to talk to somebody I can't because those AI bots get into these loops where...

[Dustin Puryear]
Oh it's the worst. It's the worst man. Now I think the whole concept of MSPs is really you can't have a one to one relationship between a technician and a customer because it really puts everybody at risk.

And granted like for us we really were putting a lot of emphasis on our account management to keep the relationships alive but the reality is unless you're you know unless you're like a national MSP don't lie to yourself. A lot of your customers are there because of the relationship. And if you get rid of just the relationship between you and the customer 90% of MSPs that like there's no checkboxes that one feels that the other doesn't.

And it comes down to how strong is that personal relationship you've built not what's your stack. Customers really don't care what your stack is. Like why would they care if you use Halo or Autotask.

I mean that doesn't make any sense.

[Uncle Marv]
The only time it has cared is when a customer's either been burned by something and the tech blames the product. And so their customer remembers that.

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah the kitchen's behind argument from waiters. I used to wait tables in college. And one thing everybody needs to know is God help them and I'm sure I'll be shot at the next restaurant since I'm revealing the secret.

Most of the time when a waiter says the kitchen's behind they forgot to put your order in. And we all learn to say the kitchen's behind. And yeah so technicians always blame.

Oh man I missed a ticket. The ticket didn't update. Okay it just magically stopped working.

This one customer tickets quit working. Yeah we know that's not true.

[Uncle Marv]
Alright so maybe I will figure out a way to put that question on the inside the app or something so that people can give us their input on when does AI hurt your customer relationship. Or how can it hurt? Or how can it hurt.

That doesn't sound.

[Dustin Puryear]
Okay when. Let's go with when.

[Uncle Marv]
When or how.

[Dustin Puryear]
You're the pro here.

[Uncle Marv]
I'm not the pro I'm going to go ask AI.

[Dustin Puryear]
Oh yeah you're going to be like Chad TPT refine this question. Yes. You know what I do use AI for a lot on a personal level is I tell it I'll paste in something long and I'm a talker Mark and so if I'm typing something out I'll take it and I'll say reduce the word count by half.

And then it will just streamline my lengthy email I was about to send out.

[Uncle Marv]
Do you do you dictate your emails like do you talk into something that you know makes an email for you?

[Dustin Puryear]
I'm classic for opening notepad typing in my long email copy pasting that to Chad TPT. I'm probably doing stuff so inefficiently there's so many widgets out there but I'll just put a notepad and then I'll paste it in Chad TPT and I'll say reduce word count by 50% and then I'll take what it has and then I'll send that out.

[Uncle Marv]
So in my head I'm thinking you could you should just have a master prompt that you know generate this the following email with these items blah blah blah and just let it go.

[Dustin Puryear]
I should my little personal Chad TPT account is not nearly as sophisticated as a lot of people. I still do a lot of this stuff manually and I keep promising I'm going to learn all this prompt engineering. It's funny on the back end when you're programming this stuff yeah you have to kind of tweak how the prompts work but it's different than when you're just sitting there typing stuff in live.

And I've seen people and they are wizards at it and here I am copy and pasting from notepad but it works and I don't have time to manage to optimize that workflow yet.

[Uncle Marv]
So I don't use it that much for that. There are times where if the email is crucial I may say you know I may draft out the email myself I'll write it all out and I may just copy and paste it and say make this sound better.

[Dustin Puryear]
Well I have said I have started writing an email in anger before when something bad is going down and then I'm like slow down and then I'll say make this more friendly.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah.

[Dustin Puryear]
And then that keeps the lawyers away.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep. So the last time that I remember doing it was when I was sending out my notice was it last month? I sent out another notice to clients because not only did I want to remind them about the Windows 11 upgrade but what was it May 1st or April 1st when Microsoft was going to raise the pricing for 365 and a lot of my customers were still on the monthly or they may have been annual but monthly and so I wanted to remind them that Microsoft is going to raise pricing again if you want to stay current or save money you can choose the annual. So I went ahead and did that and I said I needed to have reasons that switching to annual would save money or blah blah blah and so I did that and I asked my AI to fix that and it did and of course I had one customer they're like well we're going to pay it anyway why not save 5% or whatever and so they said yep do it and that was I don't know it was like 12 grand for that one email.

[Dustin Puryear]
That's pretty good but you know here's one thing I miss and one thing I don't miss about being an MSP sometimes I miss all the personal relationships I had developed over the years with our customers and we do have relationships with our customers at Rocketship but it is different because you communicate so often. The thing I don't miss is licensing. I do not miss all of the Adobe and 365 and all the random licensing that you have to deal with as an MSP and I don't think customers they always get pressured why do I need this license?

I don't think MSPs get thanked enough for digesting and then framing the licensing in an easy to manage way for the customer because it can be a real nightmare for the MSP. It's a lot of work and I do not miss that at all.

[Uncle Marv]
Well what makes it absolutely worst is that customers now can go online and find the same quote unquote license even though it's not and I just saw was it on my Edge because I use Edge to do certain things as opposed to Firefox or Chrome every time I open up Edge it's got a stupid little thing that says get Office for a lifetime and I'm like my customers see that they want that and I'm like you can't do that it's not going to work for what you need and trying to explain that difference to them where they're like well I just pay for it once and use it until my computer dies.

Yeah but you can't do this and you can't do that. They don't understand that until you relate it to in my case law firms when it's like okay look you can't do this with your time and billing program that integrates with your office if you buy that license.

[Dustin Puryear]
Well we have that problem too.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah.

[Dustin Puryear]
People are always trying to shop behind you and I feel it was the smaller customers. The bigger customers didn't have time for it. The smaller customers definitely would go down that path and we had a couple that I forget what license they bought but it was not the right license and they're like well can you get a refund?

I was like not for me. You didn't buy a license for me. You bought the wrong license.

I think it was memory equipment. They were like man you completely you're going to have to go beg for a refund man we can't help you.

[Uncle Marv]
So I have a large customer where they have an AJ so they have an admin junior who did that to me one time where I shipped you know they always send me hey we need monitors shipped to this office and I did and of course when the monitors got there AJ went and looked up on Amazon and said hey because I charged them you know the monitor price plus the shipping blah blah blah and he's like well can't we get these from them next time and I said you can but if you ask me to send a tech out to set it up I'm going to charge you installation and if you have an issue with that we won't help you with the return.

[Dustin Puryear]
Right.

[Uncle Marv]
And he's like okay.

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah we added like 20% to everything we sold and whenever we were challenged we were like otherwise we're just going to charge you for all of it. Right.

[Uncle Marv]
So yeah I got to charge you for the time to research I got to charge you for the install I got to charge you for so anything. Alright Dustin well I'm going to figure out a way to put this question in the notes to get people to respond and let's see if they do.

[Dustin Puryear]
The hot topic. The hot topic. No you do need a little mini theme song for that though.

[Uncle Marv]
I'll figure it out.

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah like on the little hot pocket thing it can like dance.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay don't get crazy now.

[Dustin Puryear]
I have a whole thing for you now.

[Uncle Marv]
Alright. Dustin where will you be next?

[Dustin Puryear]
We'll be at DattoCon Europe in several weeks. And then I'm sure we'll be at ChannelCon other conferences coming down the pipeline. I wasn't at least as an attendee going to PAX 8 Beyond but I looked at the schedule and there's no way I can do that in DattoCon Europe.

I was going to have like three days to be home and see my children. So I'm canceling the PAX 8 Beyond but I will be at DattoCon Europe.

[Uncle Marv]
That's where I'll be. I'll be well let me take that back. So IT Nation Secure is the week before PAX 8.

I had been saying that I would be there but I just found out that I have to pay for stuff so now I got to rework my budget because I am going to PAX 8 Beyond.

[Dustin Puryear]
Why do you have to pay? You're more. You got the podcast.

[Uncle Marv]
Apparently Sean Lardo did not vouch for me or something happened.

[Dustin Puryear]
Well speaking of, did I mention that we begged and pleaded? We're back in pitch it. You can be in it twice.

We're going to be in it this year.

[Uncle Marv]
You are? I didn't see your guy's name on the list. I already have people signing up for their vendor profiles.

[Dustin Puryear]
Well because I am apparently a loser.

[Uncle Marv]
Did you delegate that to somebody?

[Dustin Puryear]
Well clearly not because it's not done. Tell Sean he needs to get his stuff in order if he's not opting for you.

[Uncle Marv]
Let's see how many I've got. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

[Dustin Puryear]
Look at these little eager beavers.

[Uncle Marv]
I got 13 people already signed up for Pitcher Profiles and not one of them is Giant Rocket.

[Dustin Puryear]
Probably your platform has a bug in it.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, right.

[Dustin Puryear]
You have a glitch. I'll send you what I want to do it and then I need you to clear your schedule for that day.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh yeah, sure. That's how it works. Dustin, we'll go offline and continue that discussion which means that is it going to be you that comes back on?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah, it'll be me.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. We got to reframe that whole conversation.

[Dustin Puryear]
Have you seen this face? Of course it'll be me. Most people ask for a replacement for me, but you know what?

This is what you get.

[Uncle Marv]
You can do AI replacement now. Just do an open AI thing with you.

[Dustin Puryear]
That would be hilarious and so tacky. How frustrated would you be if my little AI avatar showed up?

[Uncle Marv]
You know how bad it will be because I'll ask a question and it won't be prompted to answer and then it will take a left turn and your AI won't keep up.

[Dustin Puryear]
Don't ask it the hot topic because it will become extremely offended. Right.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, so ladies and gentlemen Dustin Poirier with Giant Rocketship and his boxes and boxes of flying swag at the conferences. Do you have enough to make it to the next time I see you out on the road? Because that probably won't be until November.

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah, we just did another order. We ran through. We probably gave away $1,500, $2,000 so far.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[Dustin Puryear]
We just got three new boxes in like two weeks ago. It was the week before I went to my P.P. Con that we got a new shipment.

[Uncle Marv]
All right.

[Dustin Puryear]
Don't worry more. There's going to be plenty of these for when I see you.

[Uncle Marv]
I'm sure you'll place another order if you have to.

[Dustin Puryear]
Oh, yeah. Surprisingly cost-effective, but I love them. They're hilarious.

People grab them because they're kids. They usually grab three, four, and five at a time.

[Uncle Marv]
I was going to show you another piece of swag that was a fail, but we'll do that later. Okay. It's Dustin with Giant Rocketship, folks.

Follow him. He's got a guest profile in the show notes. Of course, you'll see him out and about.

Next up, DattoCon Europe. I will not be there, but we'll see you somewhere. Answer our hot topic question.

It'll either be something along the lines of when or how does AI hurt your customer relationship. We'll see what feedback we get for that. That's going to do it, folks, for this episode of the IT Business Podcast.

Be sure to check us out on the website and subscribe to get notified whenever shows come out. You can follow us on social media, YouTube, LinkedIn, and the Facebook. We will see you out here with another episode soon.

Until next time, holla.