How MSPs can Leverage the Social Economy
BY IT GLUE | October 23, 2018
Social interaction is the backbone of business. How you connect with your customers, how your team members connect with one another, how you connect with your team, are all important, if understated, aspects of running a world-class MSP. Social technologies have become the norm in most workplaces – if you don’t use Slack, MS Teams or a similar app, you probably should. A recent study by McKinsey states that “by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers – high-skill knowledge workers – by 20 to 25%.”
At IT Glue, we’re all about helping increase MSP productivity. That’s the backbone of everything we do – give you the tools to run your business better. So we found this particular article rather thought-provoking. Here’s some tidbits that you should know about.
Social Apps Reduce Communication Friction
How much time does your team spend searching for information? Too much, probably. Social apps allow people to be more available, and directly to each other. If one member of your team needs to ask a question of another, social apps make that communication instantaneous. Why not just use email? Because everybody receives too much email to process it efficiently, and best practices tell us to check email only periodically. A virtual shoulder tap is much quicker.
Social Apps Increase Collaboration
Formal work teams can get bogged down, as everybody wants to have their say. Plus, by their nature, formal teams almost always require sit-down meetings, approvals and the like. With social apps, your team can collaborate more effectively. Members can give their input when needed, but otherwise step back and focus on their other work. Nobody has to waste time sitting in a meeting for which they have nothing to contribute, when the meeting is a discussion on Slack or Teams.
Collaborative Documentation
Then there’s collaborative documentation. IT Glue has a number of tools that help your team collaborate. First, you can set edit permissions so that anybody with a contribution to make can do so. Version controls serve as a defence that allows you to revert, should something go wrong with this collaboration. Documents can be flagged so that others can be alerted to the need for their contribution, and they can receive that alert via a social app (webhook to Team, Slack, email, etc.).
External Communication
Social media is also a focus of the social economy and can be a powerful tool to amplify your message. If you’re like most MSPs, finding talent is an issue. So how’s your Instagram game?
If you’re not seeing the connection, you’re not alone. But Instagram is one of the first places a prospective employee will look, and for businesses it serves as a window into the organizational culture, and work-life experience.
Prospecting is done via social media, too. Differentiation is always a challenge for managed services providers, but by having an active and engaging social media presence you can showcase your story in interesting and creative ways. I don’t think for most MSPs that social media would ever fully replace word of mouth and more conventional marketing forms, but it can be a great resource for nurturing prospects and helping them move through the buyers’ journey.
IT Glue as a social technology?
While we are a documentation application, IT Glue has many of the same qualities and opportunities as other social technologies. For one, it’s an awesome way for team members to collaborate with one another, and stop searching for information. By getting your employees using IT Glue, they can contribute to creating and updating SOPs, client information, and more all the while staying up to date on any changes. Flags and workflows are means by which your team can be alerted to documentation in need of updating, and workflows can be tied to social technology via webhooks.
To learn more about how IT Glue allows your team to collaborate and streamline business processes, sign up for a demo today.
IT Glue™ is a proven, best practices-driven IT documentation platform packed with features designed to help you maximize the efficiency, transparency and consistency of your team. With so much of your business productivity lost each day in search of vital information, let IT Glue secure this information and start Freeing Minds™.
