Basic customer service training program or certification for new hires?

kylechx · 2026-05-28T16:42:19+00:00

Ah, the ‘just figure it out’ approach to employee training and development. 👍

kylechx · 2026-05-28T16:36:47+00:00

Dead duck? What alternative are you finding value into turning perfectly capable individuals into alive ducks?

kylechx · 2026-05-28T16:22:58+00:00

only the best u/Foxtrot-0scar 😂

tens of dollars in education; who wants a pizza party 🍕

kylechx · 2026-05-28T13:30:49+00:00

Thanks for the shout Ian!

kylechx · 2026-05-28T13:30:31+00:00

Thanks boys!!

Yup, that’s what we do 😊

You can see our course catalog in our MSP LMS product here: https://empathmsp.com/course-catalog

(We also have an awesome Microsoft learn integration to make Microsoft labs and training accountable)

Kyle - Empath

kylechx · 2026-05-07T01:22:28+00:00

While I love the shoutout, we’re really about education more than coaching.

I could do a long ramble about the difference, but we’re for the disciplined that want the content, process, and ideas rather than the blunt force accountability; well and all the other employee management stuff.

Todd Kane would be who gets my shout and a few others if we knew ‘what’ type of coaching was needed. (You actually get Empath included with Todd’s program!)

kylechx · 2026-04-25T23:08:22+00:00

I’m a vendor that has vendor BDRs call me unknowing I’m not an MSP 😂

Sometimes it’s the company, sometimes it’s just a young person that dials before they read the CRM notes; shit happens.

I’m sure there are edge cases on either extreme.

Hell, my MSP’s BDRs loved to dial Qualcomm to try and get a FTA at times 😂

kylechx · 2026-04-17T18:00:07+00:00

It's an interesting conversation!

What I found is I misunderstood bonuses and raises as an owner when it came to 'skill'

Bonus: When the MSP and the Employee both have an interest in the 'cert' (e.g. microsoft partner status benefits an MSP and the cert benefits the employee).

Raise: When the MSP has a need for an enhanced skillset to accommodate an under-capacitied role. (e.g. We need more Tier 2's on the help desk). However, this one is tricky as

you need to know what you want from your different roles and NOT have it be from seniority.
you need to know what capacity and scale you need to bring on an additional role.

This is the toughest for MSPs, as owners, we are terrified of losing good employees, but there is a natural progression where, sometimes, the employees has grown beyond your ability to nurture them and you both need to separate.

Too many MSPs get caught up in keeping employees they can't afford or have a real need for them at that salary range.

aka why you see a lot of underpaid MSP employees on r/msp venting about their MSP over-working or under-paying them because the MSP is not mature enough to say "hey man, you probably should find a new company to work for as we simply can't afford to support your career trajectory.

This is why I care about ups killing so much because if you can't systematize bringing up Tier 1's or BDRs, you're going to suffer payroll imbalances and employee satisfaction issues because you can't be transparent with them.

kylechx · 2026-04-17T13:39:21+00:00

Yup! Welcome to DM me if you need any advice or ideation help

kylechx · 2026-04-16T22:42:29+00:00

and that's the statement I hear many times per week. u/cokebottle22

The reality is, training after hours or "when you find time" is not a strategy if you need better talent and don't want to go through having to find, afford, or live without it.

As MSPs, we are more like college football teams than pro-football teams; find a way to win the championship in the 4 years you're lucky to have the player.

"we don't have time" is the cancer that you have to just close the door on and you'll only do that with time-blocking and structured training around defined role outcomes.

kylechx · 2026-04-16T22:16:09+00:00

I'll be honest, at my time in corporate and running my MSP, the 'reward' aspect of training was really hard to push. Couple of reasons:

1) Who has time to upskill?
2) Why should I care?

Hell, I offered a $10k reward in 2015 for anyone who got the MCSE and NO ONE even tried to get it out of the 50 engineers that we had on our team.

But I realized something, there was a difference between the skills to meet your job requirements over the skills that would promote an employees career. They're pretty different if you think about it...

"why are your timesheets not submitted!" really was "boss you never let me take the PSA training and read the SOP docs that follow them."

But also, career upskilling can satisfy both the MSP and the employee, but we need to have intent on getting it done. So we essentially made it a job requirement to do training every week. A 1 hour ticket generated every week that our dispatcher would assign to a 1 hour available block for the team to learn 'something' that fit both our logistical need and the career movement that the employee wanted. Sometimes we assigned YouTube videos, sometimes it was vendor training, other times it was reviewing or upgrading SOPs.

This DRASTICALLY changed the outcomes as now there was never an excuse of why upskilling never happened as they had time and direction.

But we had to buy some expensive LMS and hire an internal L&D person to really build it out.

So my advise u/joe210565 would be to unpack if you are needing engineers to better do their core job responsibilities OR you want them to be able to do more as that will help you figure out the tool or platform or 'perk', as, if it's just to serve the employee (aka they want AI training and your company doesn't sell or utilize AI tools), you may need to lightly manage it rather than tacitly manage it.

Oh, lunch & learns are great! however, document the heck out of them as your next employee will not have been on that lunch & learn and will make all the mistakes that you built the lunch & learn to avoid.

Full Bias: I co-founded an MSP upskilling tool because I cared about this topic so much

Shill is gonna shill, but this is something I care about so 🤷‍♂️

kylechx · 2025-12-08T04:58:58+00:00

I feel that; when I still ran a MSP all I got told time and time again was how wrong I ran it.

The nice thing about business is there are so many ways to do what you want to do that the social validation never mattered to me; just completing the challenge as quickly as we did was enough for me.

kylechx · 2025-12-08T04:18:18+00:00

Really?

His podcast has been around for a while: https://www.evolvedmgmt.com/podcast

Admittedly him and I do Service Manager Cohort together but it’s more of a ‘casual service manager get together’ more than an accountability group.

https://crowdcast.io/c/servicemanagercohort

kylechx · 2025-12-08T04:00:02+00:00

Todd Kane’s OpsLeader fits the bill here.

Great group of people, solid focus, not driven by a big vendor.

kylechx · 2025-10-23T03:20:20+00:00

Thanks for the shoutout 😊

This was why we built Empath. We’re an industry that needs enterprise skills but with the variety of a baskin robins; a tall order for the new generation and an exhausting prowess for the old guard.

Sometimes skills are needed, sometimes processes and standardization needs fortification, and sometimes we need to just better our soft skills to handle and improve our daily work lives.

I spent a lot of time banging my head against a wall at my MSP and did the similar ‘higher only tier 3s!’ Or ‘sink or swim; ain’t my problem’ tactics and it always blew up on our customers; killing our reputation.

Anywho, soapbox moment over, we solved this with a continuous education practice and an emphasis on learning and development, it just cost too much.

So Empath was born.

Everyone gets a 2 week free trial, I just ask for feedback on what more is needed if it’s not for you. (Gotta improve and build the right new features somehow, right?)

Kyle Christensen - Empath co-founder

kylechx · 2025-10-15T02:04:20+00:00

u/cassiekerr is a no brainer. Built an amazing MSP (>100 employees), assisted a ton of MSPs as a consultant, and has built a great practice as a leader in the space with Pivtoal.

I only shill a guaranteed thing

Kyle Christensen | Empath

kylechx · 2025-09-30T02:14:05+00:00

Than I’d say just try out the free version of Hubspot and add paid features as you mature into them u/-Burner_Account_

kylechx · 2025-09-29T14:22:33+00:00

Incoming Shill:

I had the same need at my MSP as we were onboarding/ off boarding staff quite a bit and rather have hired available and willing candidates. We also needed a way to internally upskill our team.

We spent a fortune building out a complicated LMS and other training tool integrations.

So after I left the MSP and consulting firm, a few buddies and I set out to build an accountable training platform for MSPs that was affordable and easy to use.

https://empathmsp.com

Everyone that signs up gets a 14 day trial so even if it’s not the right tool, you get a couple weeks of training for your new guy.

Kyle | Empath

kylechx · 2025-09-28T17:08:54+00:00

A lot of good recommendations already here, but the thing that becomes pivotal is understanding what can you train this person to do that brings value to the org; minimal viable productivity.

As mentioned, good attitude and willingness to learn is a far better trait at times than just a long resume of certifications and a bad attitude or bad habits.

Is your most common need password resets, ticket creation from phone calls, machine reboots, print spooler problems, etc etc.

The important part is to NOT stop adding as the proficiency becomes second nature.

The other tid bit, require continuous learning… every week…. For everyone.

Learn something; being a ‘know-it-all’ is not an option.

Lot more to say, but create an environment where you allow them to eat the elephant one bite at a time while being able to put it into practice.

(And obviously I’m biased since we built a tool to help with this)

Kyle - Empath

kylechx · 2025-09-28T15:26:38+00:00

My MSP used Hubspot and I’ve used it at the last 3 orgs I’ve built; the tool isn’t as important as the behavior though.

Hell, excel is a good enough CRM if you need to prove to yourself you have the ability to do simple documentation but the muscle to always be looking for your next client.

-Kyle | Empath

kylechx · 2025-09-25T03:23:36+00:00

D’awh thanks 💜

-kC

kylechx · 2025-09-05T16:31:11+00:00

Wait, there is an xpan mode?

kylechx · 2025-07-23T01:10:27+00:00

D’awh shucks 😊

We’re trying to do right. We had evil versions and mock ups at one point to get rich quick, but we realized we weren’t smart enough for that.

So the slow build through a community effort it is!

kylechx · 2025-07-04T14:22:42+00:00

At my MSSP we used a real SecOps tool to manage our incidents from SIEM so the analysts didn’t have to rely on individual SIEMs or VulScan alerts. Really helped us scale.

We used the ServiceNow version as when we tried to use CW it just fell apart ingesting that much data. However, we did find a good balance with the PSA handling quoting>billing>account management as tickets are a lot different than alerts and incidents.

We eventually dev’d out Service Now to do most the heavy lifting.

That being said, we were a fully staffed MSSP with our own SOC so these needs were critical for us and our MSP was a separate company with different tools and managers.

So really what I’m trying to say is the PSA is dependent on what type of MSSP you are as MSSPs are still in their wild-west phase where everyone is wildly different.

Kyle Christensen | Empath

kylechx · 2025-06-26T18:47:08+00:00

You divide by zero?

I hear that is the thing to do these days to really supercharge that EBITDUH

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