It doesn’t matter that your MSP wasn’t using CrowdStrike. What matters is that it was in the news, and it made your clients nervous. They needed comforting and if you didn’t comfort them, then you missed an opportunity to add some cement to your business relationship with them.
Were your clients actually fine?
No, they weren’t. It doesn’t matter that you don’t use CrowdStrike in your security stack. Your client doesn’t know that. What they know is that the media called this a Microsoft update problem, and the blue screen of death was popping up everywhere including the Starbucks they stop at on the way to work. They run Windows and it gets updates. OMG, STARBUCKS IS DOWN! The radio is talking about flights being cancelled. Social media is full of horror stories. Their anxiety level is high. Their business is about to be down too. When will it happen to them??!!!??
If you didn’t step in, to comfort them with an explanation of the real situation, and assurances that it won’t impact their computers, then you missed a huge opportunity. Silence is deafening as they say, and it’s also memorable. This is not how you want to be remembered.
You want to be remembered for your calm confidence. You want to be remembered for having everything in hand and being concerned for your clients’ business, because you proactively reached out to them. Because you cared enough to do so.
Why do you have to reach out?
An MSP’s work is done mostly remote these days and that means that we have to work harder to maintain the client relationship. MSPs also have more clients per technician and that means less personal interaction with each client and each employee at each client. It means that it’s easy to be forgotten or taken for granted.
An MSP may consider themselves to be doing a good job when calls for help are answered quickly and there are few of them. But your client probably doesn’t view it that way.
Of course, answering a ticket quickly is important but it’s not important enough to keep a client happy. I wrote a blog post about this and how I worked to help my staff internalize it by saying, “We’ll get fired if a client can’t print, but we won’t keep a client because they can print” It’s still true. You can click there to read that post.
Clients know a lot about computers today but even if they don’t, they understand enough to know that any MSP can help them print. But it takes a special MSP to care about their business.
What should you have done?
An MSP has the challenge of how to earn loyalty and maintain relationships across many clients. The best way to do that is by direct email and social media. Not one of those but both. Keep your email list ready to go at all times. Use it sparingly at critical moments.
You may have heard about the computer problems happening out there today. Grocery stores, airlines and Starbucks are down with computers experiencing the “blue screen of death”, as we call it, when they started up this morning. The media has focused on that blue screen, calling it a windows update problem, but it isn’t. It’s a third-party software issue.
A piece of security software that is often used by large enterprises pushed out an update and it interfered with Windows ability to boot. It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t get my Chai Oatmilk Tea this morning or that you couldn’t get your coffee and I’d help Starbucks if I could, but you aren’t going to need my help today and your computer is going to be just fine. You don’t use the software that is causing the problem.
I hope that your business activities aren’t disrupted today by other companies’ problems. But if so, please be patient. I’m sure that their IT department is moving as quickly as they can. Most big firms don’t have the staff available to reach every computer in a short timeframe. It may take them some time to reach all of the computers and apply the fix.
We’re on alert but I don’t expect this issue to spread into any of our clients.
A simple email that expresses sympathy, is calming, and gently upbeat goes a long way to comforting someone. The resulting confidence boost will forever be associated with your MSP. And while, they might know that anyone can fix their computer, they also know that not everyone cares about them.
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2 thoughts on “The Crowdstrike situation was your MSPs opportunity to exhibit leadership”
Great post. That morning, I woke up to the TV news plastered with “major IT outage” and braced for the worst. After discovering it was a Crowdstrike issue and breathing a sigh of relief since we don’t use that (Defender XDR FTW!) my first instinct was to just get cracking on my To Do list. But I decided to spend a few minutes firing off a couple of emails to the orgs I support letting them know that this “outage” did not pertain to them but might affect third-party services they were using, and to let me know if there were any questions or concerns. (Sure enough, within the hour we received communication from a handful of providers informing they were down.)
I’m glad I took a few moments to reach out. I think it’s an example of something that can be low effort, but high value .
Good for you! your customers will remember your kindness.