I have one more quick, unrelated question I wanted to ask you about Apple messages for business.

I think you had mentioned that when we last spoke. Yeah. And I looked into it a little bit recently and found that you need to identify a is it an MSP which is used in a, is it a same acronym? Different meaning it’s maybe you know better than I do. I don’t have a top of mind, but it’s like a, a.

Something like a voice provider or something like that, right? Yep. And so you need to identify a company that can integrate with Apple messages for business, right? And that may involve changing your VoIP provider, or maybe this is a bolted on separate thing from a different provider. But can you speak a little bit about your experience with that?

And also, I’m curious, speaking of benefiting the clients, do people find that there’s a lot of value in you having that as an offering for a way of sup accessing your support?

Yeah, I think so. Right now I would say 50% of our support comes through chat. 30% of that is coming through the s m s channel and the rest of it is coming through Apple Business Chat.

We use a platform called Haymarket, and Haymarket is a group text line, SMS first. Support system. It integrates with Slack and other tools, and they can integrate directly with your page, Twitter page, et cetera. So you can feed in a lot of inputs from different sources. And then you use the backend of Haymarket, like a ticketing system.

Essentially your texts and chats come in as different inbox threads, and you can have threaded conversations. With each person. So right now all of our technicians have access to it. It’s integrated with Apple Business Chat, and it was one of the only platforms on the market that I could find, at least at the time.

This was about two years ago, that was doing that beta program. I actually thought it was strange that Apple had released Apple Business Chat many years ago and it didn’t really take off until semi-recently, and it’s still not. Where I think it could be or should be. I think they really targeted large corporate businesses versus the smaller end of the spectrum.

But I really feel like it is the future of tech support. It’s a pretty amazing platform. We love it. It integrates really well with. The Apple Business Register when I think that I don’t know if you guys saw, but Apple actually released the registration for businesses to manage their business listing on Apple Maps, and it integrates right into that same platform.

So you integrate it there, you would. Associate it to your business brand and you pick your colors, you upload your logo, and it changes the way that messages displays your accompanying your brand. When people interact with you on Apple Maps and in other places within the Apple ecosystem. It’s a very frictionless and amazing support experience.

I think clients clearly as Apple support people. They wouldn’t expect us to support getting help that way. Yeah. I’m curious if it’s separate from your business phone number though, right? It’s It is its own, yeah. Okay. So it can be a totally different provider and you can just add the little bubble or whatever link on your website and those.

The other channels and just do support that way. I’m also looking for a group, SMS provider. I’ve gotten some good feedback from the Mac admin, slack and the ACN channel where I asked about there’s that support group, SMS, because we use RingCentral as of now. For years I’m not. Thrilled with their level of support and this feature in particular, they’ve been promising for a long time and not really rolling out.

We want the ability to easily receive an SMS from a client and then have the ability for multiple support people to reply on that thread from the company number. And right now we can’t. Do that. We can reply from our own extension, basically our own number. But I think other providers do support that.

So I guess now I’m learning that’s a separate kind of function. Like you can deal with SMS. Yeah. In that way, but then also tack on Apple Bus chat or messages for

business. A hundred percent. We started out we’re pretty big users of OnSip and OnSip doesn’t have any text messaging at all, but on their backend they can peel off the configuration for text on the number and they can redirect any inbound SMS traffic to any third party a provider.

So we were able to keep the same number that we were using for voice traffic, have voice go to OnSip. Text passing through OnSip and making its way to Haymarket, where the tool itself integrates with, like I said, a variety of different platforms. And so it’s not just Apple Business Chat. If someone hits us up on our Google Page listing and they start chatting with us there, it feeds back into Haymarket as well It’s pretty powerful and pretty convenient for us.

Two of the biggest things that we use it for, obviously client support on the front end, but on the back end multi-factor authentication codes. Oh yes. I had to recently add another number because my two-step authentication with Apple had just met its quota for all the Apple IDs I’ve tested over the years.

So having another number or something like that is, is better. But I did have a follow up to this because I am cur always curious about this. Because I had a customer that they submit tickets as they normally do. But yeah, now we’re in a integrated Slack channel where their company and our company can slack each other and they prefer to reach out in that method because it’s more real time, it’s more immediate.

And that in turn, It creates a situation where they feel the support response should be also more immediate. So do you use this in just your opening communication with a customer or just for ongoing support? And how does that affect the response time that they anticipate from using sms?

We’re very clear on the correct usage of each support channel, right? When we onboard a client, we say we have three ways that you can contact us if it’s a standard request. And you’re okay with waiting up to 30 minutes, then email us. If you are having an issue with email and you can’t email us, you can call us.

If you’re having an emergency and you need help right away, you can text us. And we hold people to the type of request that we get in each channel. So if someone calls with a non-urgent request, we get as much information as we can and we try to schedule them for an appointment. As soon as we can, if someone texts us with a non-urgent request, we’re getting as much information as we can and we’re sending them our booking link and instructing them to find a time to meet with us.

So we, we set those boundaries and clear lines in each channel, and we give our clients the flexibility to hit us up in any channel and we. Give them the discretion and the instructions and then we just hope, you just hope for the best. But so far it’s been working out pretty well. I think the other automations that come into play, when you have a good ticketing system and you’ve got a good round robin phone system and you’ve got a good SMS based chat system is you can put rules in place, you can put autoresponders in place, you can put hunt groups in place that will ensure that.

Even if you’re not available to take the call or to answer the chat, they are aware that, hey, they’re next in queue or we’re not available right now. Leave us as much detail and we’ll get back to you. And I think clients realize like they can’t always expect real time. We’re still very much at working with our clients and telling them like, yes, we are a larger company.

We are many technicians. But it’s still going to take time for us to really tap into that deeper bench of knowledge and grow. We’re growing with you. We’re still a small team, and so we’re still approaching our support channels that same way. All that to say that our backend ticketing system has been join forces There.

But our phone systems and our text systems are still separate, primarily because of the regional numbers that everyone is used to calling in the regional text lines and platforms that we’re used to giving our clients the one channel. The Apple Business Chat has been rebranded to the Interlaced larger channel.

So if you were to find our Apple business, Chat on Apple Maps Interlaced or Grove Technologies, powered by Interlaced, and you started chatting with us, you would see the Interlaced logo on the Interlace color scheme.

Nice. Yeah, I mean it’s always interesting like with expectations from clients like you said, I mean they clearly, like people have an expectation that. Texting will be basically immediate and same thing with Slack, and even to the point where if you don’t get back to ‘em right away and then you get back to ‘em later, there’s a pretty good chance they’re just like, oh, that was like yesterday’s problem.

It’s solved now. I didn’t, I don’t need you anymore. I meanwhile, you’ve spun up a ticket and did everything, and so if you don’t act immediately, like they can just let that. Thread fall off their radar. It’s an interesting struggle to try to you to reset expectations as time goes on. And then there’s times where I’m just like, I wish I just had an easy system to text a person right now, because I know that would work better for me too.

I just often don’t want to like I. Establish that as the baseline where they just think they can text me anytime and get help immediately, because that seems to be the expectation that it always reverts

back to. Yeah, that’s the beauty of Haymarket. I can set a schedule and I can say, after this hour, send an automatic reply saying, we’re not available right now.

We’ll get back to you at x time. And for me, I actually, the Haymarket platform really love any sort of, whether it’s an SMS based thing or whether it’s coming in from Apple Business Chat because. Most of the customers that we have also have Splashtop installed. And if they’re having a problem, I can just chat them and say, Hey, send me a code, and I can just pop right into their system.

I know that they’re already not wanting to talk with me because they chose that method, and more often than not, I can be on the phone with someone and chatting and controlling someone’s screen. Yep. And helping multiple people at the same time, which I find super convenient. Oh, totally.

Yeah. I hate sitting there watching a progress bar and making small talk with a client live on the phone.

You were just talking about this today, Joe. Yeah. And the more you have that line of communication open, the more they’re just telling you all the backstory of all kinds of things you really don’t need to know as you’re trying to just, you just know the solution, but it’s just a matter of time.

So it’s great if they give you that unattended access and then you can multitask and you can benefit from that. So that sometimes billing multiple clients in the scope of that, when you’re waiting for things, I’m gonna check that out. It’s on my list now to explore those options further, but that’s interesting.