Your Customer Is Your Paycheck: Why It Matters (EP 901)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast. This is the weekly live show presented by our friends over at ThreatLocker. And I normally don't do this, but I am going to give an early plug for ThreatLocker because I don't know if many of you know that I actually use ThreatLocker. 

They were one of the tools that I was reluctant to use in the beginning because I thought, man, that's a lot of money. But I will say this, it has been a fantastic tool, and I am almost to the point where it is installed on every single endpoint that I have. And if you're under a managed agreement with me, you're going to have ThreatLocker. 

That is the basic level of cybersecurity that we do. We do have additional layers that we do, but ThreatLocker is one of those that is in the very basic stack, no matter what it is. And even if you are not a user of ThreatLocker or you use something else, I would say that if you head over to the ThreatLocker website and just participate in their educational series, they have under their resources page, they have a link to 100 days to secure your environment web series. 

It's 15 weeks. If you multiply 15 weeks by seven days, it's 105 days, and they go through everything that you need to do to secure your environment, everything from talking about analyzing the behavior, web filtering, hardening your Mac environment, incident response framework. It's all free.

And each week, Danny and I believe it's Rob Allen sit down and give you an hour's worth of material and well worth it, even if you don't use it. Let me tell you a little bit about tonight's show. I've got a couple of different titles that I went through. 

It was inspired after watching a podcast that has nothing to do with tech. It was a completely different podcast environment. Some of you know that I listen to a lot of other podcasts. 

I watch YouTube channels. As a matter of fact, in the mornings when I get into work, the first YouTube station that I have on is my local news station. They go from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. or 10 a.m. And after 10 a.m., I just kind of let YouTube go, and it's noise in the background.

So I have YouTube videos and podcasts that will range anything from eBay selling to Florida body cams to MLM. It's a lot of stuff. So I was watching a video of a guy who was an eBay reseller, and he was talking about customer service. 

And he was saying that, why is it that we make customer service so hard? And he was talking about it from the standpoint of eBay customers, whether they want to return, whether they're trying to do a negotiation of a price that if you have it up on eBay for a price, and they try to give you an offer and all of this stuff. And he goes through a lot of other things. But the thing that caught me was just the whole simple thing of, why is customer service so hard? And I started thinking back to some of the things that I had been going through over the last few weeks. 

I had told you about one of those with our Bosch refrigerator, that it took us almost a month to get replaced because of a broken condenser. And the freezer part worked, but not the fridge part. So we had to move everything from there to our garage fridge, and everything else just suffered either or we had to bring to the office because we've got our office fridge here. 

And yes, it was under a partial warranty, but it took forever to get through. And I started thinking about that. I started thinking about a situation that I told you guys about over the last two weeks with another provider that we're porting phones away from, Fusion Connect, and how I was so frustrated that I would call them and ask them to tell us about which phone numbers were associated with which site, and they didn't know.

And they were actually having me look at the invoice to tell them. And I'm like, why should I have to do that? It's your system. It's your information. 

You're the provider. And I do have to do one thing and give a quick correction because they did actually come through on another support ticket that we did. We had a user that for some reason, phone stopped being forwarded. 

This is a person who had surgery and was working from home instead of taking her physical phone home, she just forwarded it. So when people would call the office, it would ring, they would try to transfer, nothing. If somebody dialed by extension, direct, nothing. 

And she said it started happening a couple of weeks ago, called support. And at first, I was a little frustrated because when you call into them, they have the dial one for support, dial two, whatever. And then you get to the person and they just take the information and we'll have somebody get back to you.

And somebody got back to me later in the day. I called in the morning, probably 10, 15-ish or so. The person did call back around two and asked for some information. 

I gave it to them. They wanted some call examples. I emailed the customer and said, do you have any call examples? She sent those back. 

Then the lady called back right at five. And I think I was on the phone. And the customer actually emailed because the customer had left for the day at around three o'clock.

So the rep was going to call them and I don't know whether they talked or not. But she called me back the very next morning to say, hey, I just wanted to let you know, I got that fixed. And I tried to call the customer, the end user. 

They didn't respond, but I wanted to let you know where we were. And they actually did a test call with me on the phone. The end user picked up and she said, hey, this is Fusion. 

We're testing everything. And it was fantastic. So I have to give them kudos for that. 

Even though it did take a little bit of time to get working on the ticket, the person followed through. The person did a follow up with me of all people, not just the end user. So I have to give them a little kudos for that.

So that's where that inspiration comes from. I'll get a little bit more into that into the night. I want to go ahead and do a quick set of shout outs.

My first shout out needs to go to Matt Solomon of the channel program. Last night, we went to a nice little steakhouse here in Fort Lauderdale. Matt Solomon messaged me on the LinkedIn and said, hey, I'm going to be in Fort Lauderdale. 

I'm doing this dinner. I want you to be there. And I'm kind of like, yeah, OK. 

And then a few days later, he's like Marv, would like for you to attend. So I was able to attend. And not only was Matt Solomon there, but David Sohn from Helpt, Tim Coach from Cynomi, Michael Goldstein, a little competitor here, LAN Infotech, Michael Bourlaugh  from Capstone IT Services. 

He's up from the Jupiter area. So he literally had, I think, about a two hour drive home. It's actually Palm City. 

So it's even north of there after this event to go home. So all people that I saw there at the dinner, so it was a good time, had a nice meal. And for those of you that do not know the channel program, it's a great little place that kind of bridges the gap between vendors and IT providers.

You can go to their site. You can see just about every vendor, a ton of which you probably don't even know about. And you can look up categories and find out if you're looking for an EDR product.

You type in EDR and you can see all the vendors there. You can actually select information if you want to get a demo, if you want information on them. If you are a partner with them, you can click in and say, yes, I'm a partner. 

And then you have access to a separate partner portal. There's a whole lot of things there. They've added some new products because before everything that they were giving was free. 

But now they've added this better tracker program. And it is something that is the next level in terms of not only analyzing your own accounting, I guess, if you want to keep track of all your subscriptions, what you're paying for monthly and find out that you might be paying for two things that are overlapping and you don't need them. And then you can also sell this to your customers and do the same with them and get an idea of a total IT spent, which is one thing that we talk about being able to do with our customers. 

But do we ever get that full insight as to what they're spending in the full IT stack? So that's available there. I won't go into too much of that. But Matt Solomon, thank you for getting me out there. 

So shout out for that. The next shout out that I want to give is actually related to tonight. This morning, I needed to call the Millers because I have yet another ubiquity project that came up. 

I've got a customer that requested some doorbell cameras at their office. They had a little incident. They are in an office building where the doors to the outside of their office are just wooden doors. 

And the building won't let them put peepholes so they could see who's there. And for a long time, it didn't matter. This is the type of client where they don't have customers come to their space. 

And anybody that does come to their space in terms of employees or vendors like me, we have key fobs that we can get in and open the door and all of that stuff. Well, they had an incident and now they want to be able to see who's at the door before they come in, whether it's UPS, FedEx, me, that sort of thing. So we're going to put some ubiquity doorbell cameras in there. 

However, I just did a refresh of their network. So we had put in all these new EnGenius switches. We put the multi-gauge switches in. 

We did a new firewall with SonicWall in there. Yes, I know that they had a little breach with their configs and backups. I am not going to talk about that, but yes, I know about it. 

So I had just put all this stuff in. And I just needed to know, even though I went and did a little bit of research on my own, and it looked like I could get the doorbell cameras and just either a Cloud Key Plus without having to get a ubiquity switch and all of that stuff, but I just needed some confirmation. So I called the Millers and I called and asked for Mr. Miller. 

And the young lady that answered the phone said, no, Mr. Miller's not available. Now, she was pleasant. She was fantastic. 

And it could have been just right there. When I called, they picked up the phone pretty quick. It was a human. 

I like that. There was an automated thing before that, but I hit zero. She picked right up. 

Mr. Miller's in a meeting. And I said, all right, can you tell him to call Uncle Marv when he's done? And there was this slight hesitation. And she's like, Uncle Marv? With a little bit of a snicker. 

And I said, yes. And she turned, and I don't know if she was in a room with people. I don't know if she was in a room with the Millers. 

And she's like, it's Uncle Marv. And she's like, I listen to your podcast all the time. Now, at first, I'm thinking, okay, that isn t right. 

But sure enough, Jason confirmed that, yes, she does. But I just want to give a little shout out to the Millers and specifically Bonnie, because the topic of customer service, that's a perfect example of the thing that you want customers to basically see when they have first contact with your customer, with your company. First, it's going to be on the phone. 

Or yeah, it might be by email and stuff. But if somebody tries to contact you, there is still a vast majority of customers where it's going to be by phone. Even if they go to your website, they might fill out the little contact us, blah, blah, blah. 

But sometimes, I shouldn't say sometimes, a lot of times, most of my friends refer customers to me by phone. Most of the contacts that I get, even if they go to the webpage, they call, it's by phone. So that is the first impression that you get of the business.

That's one of the reasons why I have Kim answer the phone. She's much more pleasant than I am. What you're seeing right here on the show, this Uncle Marv persona, if I'm in the middle of a day and I'm working on a product and an issue and I'm doing a remote session, I may not be the nicest guy. 

If it's been a long day, if it's been hectic, I'm going through my version of ticket after ticket after ticket, email, threat locker request, blah, blah, blah. But I do want that first impression that somebody gets when they call our office to be a pleasant one. Bonnie at Unbound Digital, shout out girl, do your thing. 

Millers, you trained her up nicely. Let's see, any other shout outs? I probably should say, oh, so I mentioned that I was in downtown Fort Lauderdale for this channel program table top dinner, something to that effect. Also going on this week in Orlando is the MSP Summit, someplace where I probably should have been because it's here in the state of Florida. 

Tim Coach actually took the Brightline train from there. He had a speech that afternoon, got on the Brightline, made it to the dinner last night. So that is happening. 

ASCII Edge started today in Dallas. Lady Giles is there speaking. By the way, shout out to Steve Giles for thanking me or not thanking me, but acknowledging the summer of Marv. 

Thank you, Steve, for that. So ASCII Edge is out there in Dallas today and tomorrow. TechCon Unplugged is happening Friday in Dallas as well. 

So Paco, Rick, Corey and the gang are all there. And then later this month, if you're caught up on the podcast, you know that I had Tahir Hamid on the show. And ScaleCon 2025 is happening September 25th through the 27th in New Orleans at the Roosevelt. 

And I just want to give a little update and support other people in our space. So that is what is happening the rest of this week and month. Okay, that's all done. 

So let's go ahead and go back to this idea of customer service should be easy. So I told you that I got the inspiration from watching that YouTuber podcast. And I was thinking about the fact that I was going through all of the issues that I was going through with first, you know, the Bosch refrigerator. 

We also had a client that we were doing an AT&T fiber upgrade last week. And it frustrates me to no degree. And I'm sure it frustrates a lot of you. 

And I'm sure if we say this, you know, outside of, you know, internet providers and vendor printer copier providers, those are the worst because they won't give you a decent time window. Now Comcastic has done better. They try to do two hour windows. 

But AT&T still has this thing where their appointment window is 8am to 4pm. Absolutely ridiculous. And the technician is supposed to call when they are on their way. 

So last Tuesday, the appointment was set. The two previous installations that I had, the technicians were there pretty early in the morning. And no big deal. 

This tech for some reason didn't call, didn't show. And when you try to contact AT&T for information, they got nothing, absolutely nothing for you. That is ridiculous in our industry. 

So it made me think of that made me think of fusion. Our washing machine. Again, it's personal. 

I know it's not tech related. But Samsung, you know the name because Samsung is big in our space. They made this active water jet washing machine. 

My wife loved it. It does not have the little thingy in the middle, the agitator that the clothes go around and stuff. It's just all open.

But it was a big tub and that's what she wanted. So she could do, you know, basically a big load and long story short. So we've had that for a few years, probably since the year of our COVID.

So it's not that old, but it's starting to do the thing where it gets through the entire wash cycle. And when it gets to the spin cycle, it gets about halfway through and then it just goes berserk on its own. And if it gets out of whack, it stops, claims that it's out of balance and starts over.

Not the whole wash cycle but starts the spin cycle and the rinse and the spin cycle over again. And sometimes it corrects itself. It readjusts the load and makes it through. 

Other times she'll have to sit there and go through three, four, maybe five cycles in order to get a complete wash done. So we had done all the research. We had gone online to see there's a couple of resets and calibration options that you're supposed to do. 

You're supposed to unplug it and do some other stuff. And we did all that. And up until the point where it said, replace the rods, which is an end user friendly job. 

And I said, you know what, if I've got to take this thing apart, I'm not doing it. I'm calling for service. So that's where we were. 

So I call Samsung for service and I get the representative that I can't understand. And I try not to let that be an issue, but we couldn't get past the fact that all they wanted to do was keep asking me if I had done the reset and calibration. I said, yes, I told you I've done that. 

We've been doing that for months now. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. 

We've unplugged it. We've reset it. I've done all that. 

I'm now at the point where we need a professional. And I probably went through that conversation four times before I finally said, you know what, click. I got frustrated.

And listen, I'm not going to try to pretend that I'm an easy customer just because I do tech support. I do phone support. And it just frustrates me that this is how phone support is in 2025. 

And the fact of the matter is a lot of us in our industry, even though we have identified some of these problems, we're not fixing them the way they should be fixed. Just to give you closure on the Samsung situation, I called back, got another representative and was going through all of the explanations. And when I explained to that representative, I did the reset. 

I redid the calibration. Here's what I did. Here's the series. 

That person went a little overboard the other way and was like, wow, that's fantastic. Wow. Most people don't do that. 

And I thought, okay, now you're just blowing smoke. That's a little too much. So we got past that. 

Took my information and said that someone would call me back within 24 hours. Ridiculous in my opinion, but I waited. The next day, person calls and said, okay, I just need to confirm all this stuff. 

You're still having issues. Yeah, I'm still having issues. All right. 

So we have an appointment for you on Friday. I should probably have said that the first phone call was on Monday. So the return call was yesterday, Tuesday. 

So the first appointment is on Friday. I said, okay, do you have an appointment window? No, the tech will call you in the morning to tell you what the appointment window is. So here it is now going to be five days from the first day that I called until I can find out when the appointment window is. 

If the technician decides to call me that morning, that is absolutely insane. So I started thinking, you know, one of the jokes in our industry is that people don't like to deal with tech support, whether it's the Microsoft tech department or something else. We have that stigma that people just don't want to talk to tech. 

I even have customers that will call me to call support for them on a product that I don't even help with because they think that I have either the right technical language to get through to somebody, or I have more patience than they do to go through this. And I said, why? And they're like, just, I hate talking to technical people. And so I thought, you know, that is a shame.

So when I started thinking about the topic here of, you know, customer support should be easy, I started off with the thing that we always do. What are the top complaints that people have about calling tech support? And of course, they're always the same. It starts off with, you know, long hold times and, you know, sitting in the phone queue as a frustration, sometimes waiting, you know, 10 to 15 minutes before you talk to a person. 

I've actually gotten to the point where I will run a timer from the time I call to see how long it takes me to get through the automated, you know, press one for this, press two for that. And I have been at the point where if it's taken sometimes four minutes to go through those prompts to get to somebody, that's too long. And it happens in our industry as well. 

Other common complaints, poor communications, vague instructions. And that comes from us as technicians trying to tell somebody to do something, expecting them to understand what it is they're doing, not walking them through step by step. I need you to press this button. 

When you press this button, you're going to see this. Okay, look over to the left, press this button. That's a complaint there. 

Of course, the ones that we, you know, get frustrated with where customers say that problems are only temporarily fixed, something might be fixed, and then the next day it returns. Who knows, you know, that is a complaint, but who knows if it's actually, you know, a customer support issue or it's actually, you know, a hardware issue, software issue, or it's a user issue because they went to the wrong site again, that sort of thing. Other complaints, disrespectful or condescending attitudes, including agents talking down to users. 

That has been something that I have dealt with when I had technicians. So a lot of you don't know that there was a time I had technicians, two full-time technicians at one point, and one of my frustrations was listening to the techs talk to customers, and it frustrated the bejesus out of me so much to the point where I didn't want to have techs. One tech, I even listened in on his conversation and could hear him, let me, I'm trying to say this in a nice and politeful way, but let's just say his size when a customer would say something and he'd be, ah, I was annoyed. 

And I, it's my company, it's my tech, and I had to imagine that the customer was annoyed. So the disrespect that that was shown was frustrating to me, and eventually that was one of the reasons, one, I got rid of that tech, and eventually down the road it's like, you know what, I don't need techs, I'll use subcontractors when I need to. I've got remote support options that allow me to do more with less, that's another story too. 

Let's see, other common complaints, overuse of technical language that is hard to understand for non-exports, lack of personalization, and being transferred between multiple representatives without resolution. So that was a list of the common stuff. I don't know how many of you are watching live, but feel free to throw some of those in the chat if you want, if I did not mention something that is frustrating to you, or if you want to email me and say it in private, that would work as well.

Now, I also did a quick search on common complaints from tech support about the customers, and let's see here, the common complaints from tech support staff, customers often expect instant fixes and treat every issue as an urgent crisis. Yes, that is true, and it frustrates me when a couple of minutes to figure out, I've been struggling with it for an hour, and sometimes I say to that, well, if it took you an hour to start it with, it's going to take me at least an hour as well, but that's a joke, and they laugh. But they do put extra pressure on us, and of course, if you don't have a system where the customer gets vetted before they get to the catch the tech off guard, I know I had a conversation with a group of folks the other day, and we talked about what's the process for incoming tickets, which included phone conversations, and of course, there's the idea that I know some of you, you don't even answer the phone, let's put it that way. 

You have either an automated or an AI system answering your phone, it will assign the tickets or do whatever, or the customers are forced to leave a voicemail, and then the ticket will be assigned, or the call return will be assigned to somebody there. I know some of you do that. You don't want incoming calls, period, and the idea is that if customers have an issue, they're to submit a ticket, whether it's through your RMM or PSA, or whether it's an email. 

I know that's what some of you do, and so that could be interesting as well. Other common complaints. Some users present incomplete or inaccurate information. 

Yes, that is true. Customers may ignore provided instructions or refuse to cooperate. That is a very common frustration. 

My customers, because they've been with me so long, know now that they can't just send in a message or call up and say, it's broke, fix it, and not give me information. We're going to go through, tell me exactly the problem, tell me what you did, let me see what you did, and I'll remote in and they can show me. They are not allowed to leave, which I think is something that a lot of us go through where people will say, hey, I have this issue, can you take care of it after hours? That's not an option.

So the option is we work on it together. It is going to be during the day. I will not stay after hours to work on a problem that you tell me nothing about. 

That is a big thing here. Let's see here. Other tech support complaints. 

Users resisting or adopting new technology. Yeah, of course. I know I talked with somebody yesterday. 

Basically the same situation where well, no, that was a different thing. I better not say that because it's going to be wrong. Demanding exceptions to company policies or trying to bypass procedures. 

That's again stuff we deal with all the time. Impatience and rude behavior. So I did have one customer who yelled at one of my techs for an issue that they were having, and I don't remember the exact deal, but I remember that the person literally yelled at my tech, and I had to call back and speak to my point of contact and let them know that nobody in their office is allowed to yell at any of my staff. 

They would not be happy if I did that to them. They wouldn't let anybody else treat their staff that way. I expect the same in return, and I had to lay it down. 

I said that will not happen again, or we will not support you. I will not have that happen. I only had to do that one time and never had that issue again. 

In fact, I have talked to that particular end user many times, and as pleasant as can be, now I believe that part of that is probably because they have no idea that they did that or remember doing that because they do it all the time, and it's no big deal to them. I've got more stuff here, and I've even got some best approaches to reduce or eliminate the complaints about tech support, but when I told you at the beginning that I kind of came at this with the idea of customer support should be easy, I started going through all of this and thinking, you know what? All of this is forgetting a couple of simple tenets that I started in my business a long time ago, and they have nothing to do with what you do but how you do it, and so that's what I want to spend the rest of the time here on tonight's show going through, but I want to get to that after these messages, so we'll be right back after this. Is your business truly protected from cyber threats? ThreatLocker is the gold standard. 

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All right, so be sure to head over and support our sponsors over at itbusinesspodcast.com sponsors. And for tonight's Amazon, I want to bring up what I saw as, so a few weeks I brought up a Wavlink USB hub that was basically a docking station for a laptop where customers could set up multiple screens afterwards, and I saw this come through the Amazon purchases, and it kind of struck me as odd, and then I looked at it, and it is, first of all, it's a pluggable 16-in-1 Thunderbolt 4 dock, and you can do dual 4K monitors. It's a 100-watt charging station, 2x HDMI, 2x DisplayPort, 2.5 gigabit, yada yada.

So that is the unit there. Let me go up to here, and this can be a standing or horizontal laying on the desk unit, but there you can see that it has the two DisplayPorts and two HDMIs. It's got, on the back, four of the USB 3, or the USB 10 gig AB ports. 

It's also got a USB-C, and then the network cable there, and on the front, it's also got two more USBs on the front, USB-C, up to 98 watts on the front there. So I found that was interesting. There is the 16-in-1. 

It's an editor's choice for laptop. I don't know if that's a magazine or whatever, but it's got a micro SD card hub in there. It's got audio in and out, and of course, you saw the display options, 2x HDMI or 2x DisplayPort. 

That, I thought, was just awesome to have both options there. So if you've got a laptop and you want to throw up, you know, two big old monitors, you can do that, compatible with both Mac and Windows. It's a Thunderbolt, USB-C, or USB 4 connection, so any of those to the section there, designed to fit on your desk, vertical or horizontal, ready to get to work, and very nice. 

So I don't know who purchased that, but not only do I thank you for doing that and supporting the show, but I thank you for giving me yet another option now to use. I will say this, for those of you that saw the wavelength price, it was, there's two versions. I think one was $135 and one was $169 or something like that.

This obviously is a bit more. It's $242, but it does so much more. And if you've got customers that really, you know, high demand, I don't know, CAD stations or something like this, I might get this for my little podcast station here. 

So we'll see how it goes. So that is the Amazon purchase for the week, and thank you so much for that. All right, let's close this up and get back to customer service. 

So when I went back and thought about the whole idea that all the things that we talked about early on were, you know, the what and the how, but it wasn't necessarily the why. Why should we make customer service so easy? And it goes back to, for me, when I first started this business, I went out and got a bunch of books and I read. And the two books, I'm going to put them here. 

And did I make links for them? Oh, you know what? I did not. Let me go back and apologize. Here is the Amazon link.

So if you are watching the video and you've not checked the show notes, I'm going to put this link here. Paste. That is the link to the 16-in-1 USB docking station there.

And let me go back now. And I'm going to pull up Amazon here. Sorry for if you are watching.

Yep, I am logged in here. Good. Okay. 

So the first book I'm going to show you is as I type horribly slow, I'll hold up the book here. It's a book called Customer Service is Worthless. Customer Loyalty is Priceless. 

How to Make Customers Love You, Keep Them Coming Back, and Tell Everyone That They Know. So this was one of the books that I got in the beginning. And I'm going to throw the Amazon link to that book here.

Yes, it is an older book, but they have done some revisions. The revision that I have here is 1999. But the whole idea that I wanted to extract from this book, as well as the book after that, is the very first thing that I decided I would do is treat my customers as if they were the lifeblood of my business. 

The bottom line is your customer is your paycheck. And that is something that if you get the book here, and my notes are out of whack here, yeah, okay. So page 72 of this book, Jeffrey Gittermer puts together 12.5 customers of service success. 

And I don't know, I may go through all of these at some point, but tonight I just want to focus on principle number one. Your customer is your paycheck. So even if you are an employee working at a service provider, or a computer repair shop, or a large MSP, don't look at who signs the check as the only person that is responsible for that.

Your customers are more responsible for that paycheck than anything else. Because without customers, you don't have business, you don't have that paycheck. So it's the customers that provide the money. 

And if you were to look at this from a retail point of view, if you don't sell product, you don't have a store. The eBay seller that I was talking to you about that I saw on there, his whole idea of selling product without people coming onto the eBay site to buy product, you have no business. So we need to kind of change our way of thinking as our customer is our paycheck. 

I read that, I read this after another prospect, I mean, tangled up here, after another book. And the very first book that I read when I was starting out was called Customers for Life. And how to turn I believe it's how to turn a one-time buyer into a lifetime customer, whatever.

It was looking at the customer from the standpoint of, if you can keep that customer coming back and back, and you keep them happy, you can't look at them as just a single transaction. We talk about putting customers into one-year, two-year, three-year agreements. Well, you have to look at the customer value over the life of that agreement. 

So if they're giving you $1,000 a month for 36 months, well, that customer's worth $36,000 at a minimum. Obviously more if you sell them hardware, if you do projects for them and stuff. So when you can look at a customer over that span and think of them as, okay, that's money in the bank that I need to worry about. 

So everything that we do with them needs to be turned on its head. And instead of thinking, how can we squeeze more out of them? How about if we just simply look at them with a little bit of gratitude and happiness and just say, thank you for being my customer. And of course, some customers are looking at you like, what are you talking about? Because the idea of a customer in our field is when they call you, they're usually calling because they need help. 

And that is one of the most vulnerable times in that relationship. They need your help. So how we respond to them in that crisis is how they're going to view us.

They're going to be either, man, I was in a pinch. They took care of me. They responded.

Yeah, they didn't know the answer, but they didn't mistreat me. They told me they would get the answer. They did. 

They took care of me. Or you know what, man, every time I call them, it feels like I'm interrupting them. It feels like they really don't appreciate me.

And I give them five grand a month. Why can't I at least get a freaking return call or email? The more effort, and I think some vendors are starting to get this because they are starting to turn their pitches into the idea of we need to align ourselves not just with the simple transaction of how many endpoints do you have, but we need to align it into how can we help you succeed? How can we help optimize their business? How can we help the bottom line? How can we be a partner in this relationship? So I started to remember that these books that I got really laid the groundwork on how we should approach contact with our customers. And customer service is... Now, I don't know if I agree with the title of the book where it says customer satisfaction is worthless, but you know what? Customer loyalty is priceless because I have customers that... I have one that is supposed to be retiring and he hasn't retired yet.

And he has been with me since basically year two. He's my oldest client. He has been with me since 1998. 

And I think only one time has he ever commented about, do we really need to do that? I mean, he is one of those people. He's like, Marvin, you're my guy. I trust you.

And even though I think I did tell you guys this story a year ago when he was trying to figure out what to do, he called me to his office and had me meet with him and his secretary. And he's like, Marv, what do you think we should do? How should we handle this? Can I do this another couple of years? IT-wise, product-wise and stuff, that's the type of situation where if a customer calls you in to help them decide on a direction for their business, that's how you know that you're a partner with them. That's how you know that your customer service is everything that you wanted it to be and possibly so much more. 

So that's kind of what I wanted to transform this podcast into instead of thinking about it, not just about making it easy, but what is the whole reason we're doing this? A lot of us, we get stuck on, well, how many endpoints is it? Cybersecurity, AI, blah, blah, blah. All of that is good. All of that is well. 

But when it really comes down to it, it's really how much are we helping our customers succeed? And if we're helping them, you know, whether it's make money or save money, that's what's going to come back to us. So that's the first thing I wanted to talk about. Now, the other book that I'm going to look up here real quick on the Amazon is a book that literally says the same thing, but obviously in a much different way. 

So get the link here, throw that into the chat, and then I'll hold it up here. Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service. This is a book by Kristen Anderson and co-authored with Ron Ziemke of Service America. 

And again, it's not a tech book, but it's one that I use because, listen, customer service is customer service. Doesn't matter the industry that you're in because it's all about keeping customers regardless. So in this book, it is page seven, which is basically the beginning of chapter two. 

And the title of the chapter is Know What Your Socks Off Service Is. And it talks about customers are demanding, they have every right to be, today's customers have more options than ever. By the way, this book was, this is another old book. 

Let me get the year of it. This particular version, and I know there's another one since then, 1991. That's how old it is. 

But there's this phrase that sticks out to me, where it says, if you don't have customers, you don't have a job. So these were the two books that literally started off my perception of how I want to approach my customers. And it's not about how I squeeze stuff out of them, how I make them bend to me, it's how do I make them happy? Some of the things that came out of that, okay, here we go. 

No customers, no money. Your business is worthless and your wallet is empty without funds provided by customers. And in terms of action steps, change attitude and greetings to reflect appreciation for the customer.

They feed your business and your family. I think I'm going to stop there. I just had a thought that I did not want to get into. 

And it was, for some reason, I just had a jog of a memory of somebody at a conference that made a comment that was, in my view, quite derogatory, both to us as MSPs and to the customers that we have. And we have people in our space that are wanting us to treat clients like they're dumb, they're stupid, they don't know what they need, we need to tell them. And to some degree, while that may be true, there's a lot of things that happen in our space when it comes to new threats, the new landscape that they may not be aware of.

We have situations all the time that happen. We just went through a bunch of stuff with SonicWall and FortiGate and the firewalls, and we go through breaches all the time. We have cyber incidents. 

They may not be up to speed with how those things work, and we need to educate them. But I don't think it needs to be a situation where we treat them like they're stupid and like they don't know. They can know if we just simply take the time to sit with them and explain it in a way that they understand, not talk down to them, and treat them like people, just like we're people.

I'm going to stop there because that was going to go off on a completely different tangent, and I don't want to do that. That's pretty much it, folks. Thank you very much for tuning into this. 

Like I said, I think I may go back into this one book and talk about these 12 principles of customer service. As I was digging into this book, I kind of realized that it's been a long time since I sat down and looked at these. I actually have a PDF somewhere on my computer that I could not find that goes through and picks the principles that I felt I could deal with at the time, that I could make kind of a tenets of the business or pillars, if you want to say.

I mean, here's the thing. The value of a customer is 20 times his annual sales volume. So I'll revisit that, but I kind of wanted to talk about that. 

It's been up in discussions the last couple of weeks in some groups that I've talked with, in some discussions that I've heard, and I felt that was it. So in terms of your Florida Man story for this evening, I am not going to read the Florida Man story, but I am going to put a link here, both in the chat and the show notes, and I will give you just a little teaser titled Florida Crossbow Trash Dispute. And that is your Florida Man story for the week. 

I hope that you check that out. Enjoy it. Send comments to me if you like. 

But that's going to do it for this week's episode of the IT Business Podcast. Again, thank you for spending your night with me. I see several people in the chat there.

Thank you for hanging out. And we are here on YouTube, LinkedIn, and the Facebook every Wednesday at 8 p.m. unless I am away at a conference. Of course, you can catch the show over at itbusinesspodcast.com and find your favorite pod catcher and be notified whenever there is an audio released. 

And we're probably averaging about two shows a week when it comes down to it. So just like the channel program, Vendor MSP Match, this content is free. I do ask you to support by shopping at Amazon, and I ask you to support the sponsors that support this show that helps me get the equipment. 

They help me, you know, dedicate the time, go to the conferences, and do the on-site interviews. And I just ask you contribute the best way you can. But the easiest, of course, if you shop on Amazon, save the link for my Amazon store as your starting page. 

And then whatever you do, you do it just like you normally do, and everything comes back. We will be back next week with another episode. I think we have a pending guest. 

I don't want to jinx it, so I'm not going to say the name in case they bail. And I've got an NSITSP Vendor MSP profile. Oh, and speaking of, there's elections going.

If you are a member of the NSITSP, you should have received an email to vote as the elections for this year are coming up here. So let me see if I can, I should have gotten this ready. And yep, let me grab this here and put this in the show notes and the chat here. 

If you are a member, head over to nsitsp.org slash vote and submit your vote now for board members, committee members, and help the organization out. All right, that is the last thing. So thank you very much, guys.

We'll see you all next week. We'll see you soon. Hang on for just a second here.

Thank you to ThreatLocker for my mug. That's it, folks. We'll see you soon. 

And until next time, holla!