The importance of meeting your MSP customers face-to-face

As someone who has worked in an office environment for more than 20 years, I never considered the idea of working remotely. But as a result of what’s happened in the world over the past few years, like so many others out there, I find myself working from home full-time now. Don’t get me wrong, there are many benefits to working remotely—none more so for me than not sitting in traffic for an hour in what should have been a 10-minute commute. I’m also not advocating that we should all go back to the way things were pre-pandemic, but in this blog I want to highlight the benefits of meeting customers and vendors face-to-face, and why on occasion we need to get away from all the video meetings that have become so prevalent.

Last May, after a little over two years busily working in my little corner of my home, I attended our N‑able roadshow in Amsterdam, it’s there when I realised you can’t stay remote forever… you need to be out meeting with the people you work with. I was able to meet with many of our partners for the first time, standing face to face, having informal conversations and building relationships. I met several partners there that regularly reach out to me and vice versa. That never would have happened had I stayed tucked up in the comfy confines of my home office.

Strengthening your bond with your customers

Speaking with several of our partners at events over the past few months, it’s become clear to me that not only is it important for them to meet with us, but also for them to meet with the customers they support. The advancement in Remote Management and Monitoring tools in recent years has further reduced the need for onsite intervention, but it’s still vitally important for MSPs to meet with their clients. Face-to-face meetings capture their attention, and allow you to engage in conversations that strengthen your relationship with your customers—this is one way MSPs become trusted advisors, and it can increase your chances of maintaining that customer for years to come. If you don’t continue to develop a close and positive relationship with your customers, it’s going to be harder to build trust, understanding, or a sense of a shared goal, all of which are vital elements of successful business relationships.

So, as we start to understand the benefits of meeting face to face with other companies we work with, it’s important to also note that for those of us that now find ourselves working remotely, there are benefits to making time to meet with our colleagues as well. Companies are approaching this differently, but if you have the option to work in an office from time to time, don’t think about the hassle of the commute, but instead think about how good it is to sit face to face with a colleague and develop relationships with your co-workers outside of video calls or instant messages. You’ll be more likely to build a relationship with your co-workers when you meet them in person, so when the time comes that you need their assistance or they need yours, you’re not some faceless contact from an address list, but someone you know and can rely on.  

Don’t get lost in translation

If you are new to a role or organization, it’s vital that you make the effort to meet face to face, particularly if you’re working remotely for the first time. Making that effort to meet the people you work with will help you to build relationships easier, you can create more of an impression and you can read people’s body language, so you get a better understanding of them. Knowing how people act or react can help prevent conversations in the virtual environment from being mis-interpreted or lost in translation.

As more and more of us shift to working remotely, there are many more reasons why we need to make the effort to meet face to face—none-the-least because it can be good from a mental health and social perspective. Whereas in the past, I might have shied away from attending a trade show or social event, I now embrace the opportunity to meet everyone I work with, when I can face to face.

If you are reading this and thinking not only, do I need to go out and meet my colleagues and customers more often, but I need to meet the team at N‑able as well, check out the N‑able events web page here: https://www.n-able.com/events to see where we’ll be and follow us across all our social platforms.

Paul Kelly is the Head Nerd at N‑able. You can follow him on Twitter at @HeadNerdPaul, LinkedIn and Reddit at u/Paul _Kelly