MSP Marketing in bite-sized bits. It’s easier than you think with MKLINK. To get more of MKLINK’s MSP MBA Marketing and IT training resources, make sure that you’ve registered for your account for free now at www..MKLINK.org.

How your MSP video background influences your clients. Business interaction by video calls such as webinars, online meetings, interviews and support calls has skyrocketed in recent years in no small part due to their pandemic. This has fundamentally shifted how society expects to interact with business and, in addition, it has also set up a new set of challenges to be overcome and opportunities to be exploited.

One of these questions to be answered is how should the staff of a managed service provider appear when they’re on other people’s screens? Because, if you think about it, video calls are a halfway house between being invisible, such as being on the phone, to being there in person. It’s important because customers rely on visual cues to help them make up their minds about people and situations, so it’s important to the future of you, both as a business and a person, whether your prospects and clients decide if they like you or not, or if they perceive you as competent or not. It’s been shown in a couple of studies that wearing a uniform can contribute towards reassuring a company’s clients about their competence.

However, what hasn’t been immediately obvious was the impact that a person’s online background makes in terms of marketing and the company’s overall service scope. The interesting thing about online backgrounds is that they are an extremely controllable self-presentation environment. For example, I can’t think of many other environments in business where you can either appear to be sat at your desk or floating around in deep space.

A recent study conducted by Cara Bullet, Moore and Messinger in 2023 revealed some interesting insights about video backgrounds. The main highlight being that there’s an important disconnect between what MSP employees want and what their customers want in terms of what’s seen in backgrounds. Without reciting all the academic drudge in their otherwise very helpful paper, the main essence is that employees want to be seen as competent to their clients and their peers and their bosses. This means that customer service agents more often than not tend to have non-revealing backgrounds, such as very plain raw or a blurred background. The disconnect comes because customers warm to those employees that show revealing backgrounds, specifically positive backgrounds.

The word positive here is key because it makes an important distinction, and that’s because the effect was reversed when the background contained negative information, which is what you’d expect. As an aside, other psychology experts have suggested that blurred backgrounds may cause misattribution. Basically, what they’re saying is that having a blurred background looks like you’re hiding something, thereby resulting in a diminished amount of trust. There’s a lot more work on top of this particular study to be done before we’re convinced that we should all be appearing in front of a log fire in a rocking chair like our grandfather, perhaps holding a cup of cocoa with newspaper clippings on the wall.

However, it does mean that we can make some subtle changes that can help ourselves and our staff to appear more likeable and competent, which, further down the line, has been shown to have positive consequences for customer referrals and reviews and overall profitability. Our suggestion would be to appear tidy, effective and human. Go a little bit beyond getting rid of the rubbish and old pizza boxes to have a reasonably tidy, professional-looking workspace, but importantly, not appearing to be sterile. For instance, if you have a lot of technical journals or books or other paraphernalia, maybe humanise it all with a copy of Dilbert among the books or a mug with a humorous picture on it, something like that.

Perhaps have some family photos. If you’re worried about having anything too revealing about people, especially children, then maybe a picture of your pet or of you doing your hobby. For example, Mike likes fishing, and whilst he’s not the best angler in the world, anytime he sees someone wearing a piece of branded fishing clothing, he knows he can relate to that person and have an easy conversation with them. In conclusion, given that we seem to be spending an increasing amount of time in virtual worlds, perhaps sparing a thought for how to humanise your background whilst maintaining an air of competence and professionalism would be time well spent.

MSP Marketing in bite-sized bits. It’s easier than you think with MKLINK. To get more of MKLINK’s MSP MBA Marketing and IT training resources, make sure that you’ve registered for your account for free now at www..MKLINK.org.