Using AI for non-technical stuff (customer psychology)
EDIT: If you don't want to read AI, don't read it. If you want to bitch and moan about something, go to facebook.
I have this ongoing ticket for a few months now. It's with one of those accounts that want everything to work, except they aren't going to pay for it. Nice people but exhausting sales process.
Claude is hooked into my ticketing via read-only API (yeah it's in our privacy policy) I asked Claude to review the ticket, and found the response an interesting read and thought I'd share it.
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This is a phenomenon every MSP knows intimately, and there's actually solid psychology behind all of it.
Why business owners resist spending on IT
The core issue is that technology is invisible when it works. It's what psychologists call a zero-sum perception of maintenance spending — money spent preventing a problem produces no visible outcome, so the brain categorizes it as waste. You can't point to "the server crash that didn't happen." Compare that to a new sign out front or a piece of equipment — you can see it, touch it, show it to people.
There's also loss aversion at play (Kahneman's work). Spending $500/month on managed services feels like a guaranteed loss. A potential $50,000 outage from a ransomware hit feels abstract and distant. The brain dramatically underweights probabilistic future losses versus certain present costs.
Business owners who built their companies through hustle also tend to have a control bias — they believe their judgment and effort can overcome most problems, which works great for sales and operations, but catastrophically misapplies to infrastructure risk.
Why they explode when things break
This one's interesting. When technology fails, it triggers something called dependency panic — suddenly they realize they have zero control, zero knowledge, and zero ability to fix it themselves. That helplessness converts almost instantly to anger, because anger at least feels like agency. It's the same reason people punch dashboards.
There's also a phenomenon called expectation anchoring without investment. They've mentally categorized their computers as appliances — like a refrigerator. Refrigerators just work. Nobody maintains them. So when the "appliance" breaks, it feels like a betrayal of a basic social contract, not a predictable consequence of neglect.
The contradiction — is it insane?
It's not insane, but it is a genuinely irrational cognitive trap called magical thinking combined with outcome ownership mismatch. They want the outcomes of a well-run infrastructure without bearing the costs — and crucially, they don't connect those two things as cause and effect. In their mental model, IT spending and IT reliability exist in separate buckets. Spending goes in the "waste" bucket. Reliability goes in the "I deserve this" bucket.
The clinical term for holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously without recognizing the conflict is cognitive dissonance, and humans are remarkably good at sustaining it indefinitely when money is involved.
What actually works when dealing with them
The MSPs who crack this tend to reframe the conversation away from cost and toward revenue impact. "Your POS system was down for 4 hours last Tuesday. What did that cost you in sales and staff time?" That math, done in front of them, often exceeds a year of managed service fees — and it's their number, not yours. You're not selling IT, you're selling the absence of that feeling they just had when everything stopped working.
The other lever is social proof from peers. A business owner will resist your pitch for months and sign in a week after their golf buddy tells them about the ransomware attack that nearly killed his company. Peer loss narratives bypass the abstraction problem entirely.
TLDR - "People don't value what they can't see working, and they panic-rage when they lose control over something they never understood.
They cheap out because preventing problems produces no visible result. They freak out when things break because helplessness turns into anger fast. And they don't connect the two because in their head, "spending money on IT" and "things working reliably" live in completely separate buckets."