Don’t lose business because you can’t manage Apple devices

Up until recently, you may have felt that it was easy to ignore Macs on your customers’ networks. Particularly if there were just one or two in the marketing department or maybe a handful in a graphics team somewhere.

Maybe the person in charge of those devices had even been on Macs since the 90s and had got used to supporting themselves. Today the device landscape is changing, we’re seeing more and more people coming into the workplace that grew up on Apple products—and they love them and want to use at work and not just at home.

Your customers will be well aware that their staff work most efficiently when they’re working on the devices they want to work on; they’ll also know that some of them will even resort to using their personal devices if you try to block them from using what they want. And this isn’t just restricted to people lower down the corporate ladder, but goes right the way up to the execs. If the CEO or CFO wants to use an Apple device on the company’s network, are you really going to tell them no, or even that they need to support it themselves?

Not supporting Mac management will come back to bite you

The reality is that today, if you’re doing a bad job of supporting Macs, it’s very likely going to come back to bite you in the worst way possible. Your customers are just going to go out and find someone that can do a good job.

As a Mac MSP I used to regularly get calls from prospects saying: “Hey, our current IT service provider is not very good at Mac. And we need some who is. Can you help?”

And while that conversation may start at Macs it probably won’t stop there. Unless they have a really large amount of Mac devices they’re unlikely to want someone to just support those Macs. They’re going to want an MSP that can do everything—windows and Mac. So that conversation can quickly turn from “can you do Macs?” to “can you do both?” And because we could do both we won an awful lot of business from Windows-only MSPs.

One RMM platform to manage them all

More and more MSPs are seeing this and realizing they need to find a way to be able to support both platforms. In many ways it’s the same as what happened with VoIP. A lot of MSPs turned to doing VoIP because it’s another technology and they didn’t want their customers searching for a company to just do VoIP, only to discover that they also do IT. And then seeing an opportunity to consolidate and reduce their costs. If your customer comes to you with a technology issue or problem, you want to be able to own that conversation. That way you become their trusted technology adviser. And so it is with Macs if they’ve got them, you need to be able to support them.

As an MSP you could argue that the Mac support skill set is a little harder to find than VoIP or even the more traditional Windows skill set. This also means that the tech who can do Mac really well and then do Windows as well is going to be even harder to find.

The answer is to think of your vendors in the same way that your customer is thinking about their IT service providers.

You don’t want to have two separate platforms—one for Windows and one for Mac. You want a platform that does both. That way if you need to onboard, patch, or update Mac systems you’re doing it from within the comfort and safety of an environment you already know, this will be a step change for your techs making it relatively straightforward for them to manage devices that they may not be overly familiar with.

Ultimately having one platform to manage them all is a win-win for everybody.

With Mac management through N‑able N‑sight you can keep ALL your customers’ devices under management and keep your customers happy, using one platform. Find out more here.

Looking for more on managing Macs and other Apple devices? Check out the Mac Support section of our blog.

Brian Best is Senior Product Manager at N‑able