Have you ever had a tech steal one of your customers? Has a customer ever been furious with you because your tech stopped fixing their issue and you hadn’t even realized there was one? We all hope it doesn’t, but we all know it does.

Your technician is your touchpoint to your customer. They develop a relationship directly with them onsite.
And we all know that can include your technician agreeing to text them directly “in case of emergency.” It usually starts harmlessly and with wonderful intentions.

When the employment ends you don’t have any way to get all the contact info from your client base off of your tech’s phone! He can reach out to your customers directly and propose they hire him as an onsite tech! Noncompete agreements may help here, but are difficult to enforce against an individual, and could cost thousands in legal fees.

Maybe you have also had those times when an angry customer calls asking why an issue hasn’t been fixed.
You have no ticket regarding the issue and after some back and forth with the customer, figure out that they were texting directly with your technician who’s now on vacation.
Now the issue was left unresolved for a week, the customer doesn’t care if they didn’t really start a ticket, they’re just mad at you for dropping the ball on their issue.

You can put a policy in place to not allow customers to text at all, but you should allow your customer to communicate in the way that is convenient for them.
Time and time again texting is the preferred method of communication.

An inventive tool called Gozynta Tixt can be your insurance plan against customer information being locked on your technician’s phone. Tixt assigns your company an inbound number that you can give to your customers as a way to text your MSP. When a text is received a ticket is created and your technician can be assigned with their mobile phone as a resource.

With Tixt your technician can communicate on their phone by text but not have access to your customer’s contact information. To the customer and tech, the conversation looks like a typical texting conversation but the contact information stays in the ticket not on the tech’s phone.
In addition, the entire conversation remains on the ticket as well, so you have oversight the entire time. This is helpful both so you can see if anything fishy is happening, but also because if your tech disappears then you can pick up the ticket where they left off without the customer noticing.

We all hope techs behave perfectly, but we also realize that is not always realistic. It is important to get an insurance plan on your reputation. Keep accountability while offering your customers the ability to communicate in the way that is convenient for them!