A client calls your MSP. A tech picks up, they help immediately. That’s how you give the best possible service, right? This is the assumption that many MSP owners make which ultimately turns their MSP into a dumpster fire, delivering panicked and distracted client service while driving their techs into burnout so deep they can’t remember the last time they felt any passion for their job.
Ring after ring. A constant assault of confusion and guilt, asking themselves “Do I really have to answer it?” while already knee-deep in tickets, struggling to just get an undisturbed moment to go dig in and find an actual resolution. Does working in your MSP really have to be like this?
I hear time and time again a simple position: MSP owners genuinely believe they are delivering premium service with tech call answering. Sounds great, right? But little do they realize that they are subjecting techs to a certain type of ADHD hell. It’s burning out their best people, creating an inconsistent client experience, and slowly degrading the quality of everything the help desk stands for. Workflows which should allow for precise performance of tasks, one after another, become a scatterbrained panic where a tech gets bombarded by random people at random times with random requests. It’s complete chaos without a filter and eventually balls are dropped.
On paper, it sounds client-focused. “We answer the phone when you call.” In reality, you’re inviting them into a random mess of service with someone who may be stressed and distracted each time they dial.
The Assumption That Breaks Everything
The technician call answering model rests on a quiet assumption: that whatever your technicians are currently doing is less important than the next incoming call. That’s a dangerous default.
But if you have technicians on your help desk full time, hopefully they aren’t sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. They should be working tickets, running migrations, troubleshooting issues, documenting environments. Some of that work is genuinely critical. All of it requires focus. And every ring is a signal that says: stop what you’re doing, this matters more.
The truth is, you don’t actually know whether it matters more. Neither does the technician. Who is on the other end of the line? What pressure are they going to put on the person answering? Why should the tech be diverted? It could be that someone’s PDF is opening in the wrong program… or it could be a whole office down! The ring group doesn’t distinguish between what they are currently doing and what is interrupting that, and that’s the core problem.
What This Does to Your Technicians
Think about what you’re actually asking of your team. A senior engineer is mid-migration, deep in a critical project, when the phone rings. Should they answer? Will someone else? Can they really focus on this firewall config while listening for the next ring? Every call becomes a small bit of cognitive dissonance, not just for the person who picks it up, but for everyone who hears it in the ring group. The mental tax of deciding whether to answer is almost as bad as actually answering. Multiply that across a day, a week, a quarter, and you’ve manufactured an environment where deep work is impossible, where techs may experience daily compounding fantasies of telling a client to “take your ticket and stick it” while quietly longing for a job which respects their focus and provides an environment in which they can do their best work.
Technicians do their best work one ticket at a time: researching the issue, lining up credentials, reviewing the environment, then engaging the user with a plan before even reaching out. The ring group flips that on its head. Now they’re picking up cold: “Hi, who am I speaking with? Let me find you in the system. Can you describe what’s happening?” Two or three minutes wasted on intake that the ticketing system would have handled automatically if the user had just emailed in. Both parties leave the call slightly more frustrated than they started.
In insisting your techs continue to exist in this environment, you are asking them to continue in a workplace which does not optimize for everyone’s success. They know better-organized MSPs exist. They know that being yanked off project work to answer a tier-one call isn’t normal in mature operations. And they’re quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles while you wonder why helpdesk staff retention is a problem which plagues your MSP repeatedly.
What This Does to Your Clients
Now consider the client experience. One call gets a cheerful junior tech eager to help. The next call gets a frazzled senior engineer who’s been pulled off a project he’s accountable for, trying to mask his frustration while a user explains that Outlook won’t open. That’s not consistency, and consistency is what clients are actually paying you for.
Your favorite restaurant isn’t your favorite because of one great meal; it’s your favorite because every meal is great every time. If the chefs came out to seat guests whenever the hostess was busy, you’d get burnt steaks and a closed restaurant. If pilots came out of the cockpit to serve coffee to passengers whenever flight attendants were busy, the plane might crash. If surgeons paused patient surgery to take insurance information at the front desk, no one would get surgery at that hospital. Yet this is precisely the model many MSPs run on their help desks. Just because everyone in tech is smart enough to do everything all the time doesn’t mean they should. We can take inspiration from these better-organized industries and stop the chaos.
How did we get here though? There’s a deeper problem hiding here too. Clients call instead of emailing because they don’t trust what happens when they email. That lack of trust is something you created by not responding consistently, with techs cherry-picking tickets emailed into the board and leaving others to rot. If your clients knew with certainty that an emailed ticket gets a response within thirty minutes, most non-urgent issues would come in by email where they belong, in a queue that can be triaged, prioritized, and worked properly by someone taking ownership of the client experience.
The Proactive Service Paradox
Here’s the irony that should bother every MSP owner: you’re probably selling proactive service to your clients. But when the help desk gets busy and the ring group lights up, the proactive work: documentation audits, monitoring reviews, environment maintenance is exactly what falls by the wayside. The interruption-based culture you’ve built and the burnout which results makes the proactive promise much more impossible to keep. You’re selling one thing and delivering another, and your clients and technicians know it.
The Solution: Hire a Dispatcher (aka Service Coordinator)
The fix is structural, and it has a name: a dispatcher, sometimes called a service coordinator. This is the person who brings order to the chaos of your service desk. Once you reach roughly fifty tickets a day with three to five technicians, you’ve outgrown the mom-and-pop model and in our opinion you need this role in place. We’ve seen many MSPs sinking because they didn’t.
A dispatcher/service coordinator starts as the single point of intake for your help desk. They answer the phone. They screen for easy fixes (Has the machine been restarted? Is this affecting one person or the whole office?). They collect the basic information that turns a vague complaint into a workable ticket: correct description, accurate notes, proper priority, right categorization. They handle the quick wins themselves: password resets, simple account changes, anything that can be knocked out in a minute or two between calls. Think of them like the nurse at a medical clinic: they’re not the doctor, but they take your blood pressure, pull your history, and make sure the doctor walks into the room ready to do real work.
But intake is only half the job. A good service coordinator owns the entire ticket lifecycle. They maintain a skills matrix so the right tickets go to the right technicians: no more cherry-picking, no more awkward tickets rotting in the queue assigned to the wrong tech. They review every ticket every day and make sure each one ends with one of four clear outcomes:
- TICKET RESOLVED (hopefully)
- NEXT STEPS (the technician owns the next action and takes responsibility to do it in the future),
- WAITING FOR (an external party — client or vendor — owes a response, and the dispatcher follows up), or
- ESCALATION REQUIRED (with proper notes so the next technician isn’t starting from zero). Ownership is the key concept here. Somebody always has to own every ticket, and the dispatcher runs the system of ownership, assigning an escalation to a tech who can actually solve the ticket.
The right person for this role is not a junior intern. A dispatcher needs to be a go-getter with management or coordination experience and be someone who can hold technicians accountable without being abrasive, who can empathetically mediate between clients pushing for updates, managers asking why something isn’t done, and technicians juggling seven things at once. People such as event coordinators, military liaisons, operations center agents and hospitality managers often make excellent dispatchers. They’re technically curious but they don’t need to be a level-one tech, ideally you want someone who can understand the ticket but is not tempted to just fix it themselves.
It’s also important to specify that a service coordinator/dispatcher is not a service desk manager. The SDM looks at the desk from a bird’s-eye view; the dispatcher works inside the storm, supervising the work done by the technicians and running processes to keep all the tickets moving so the SDM can manage the system the dispatcher is enforcing and take escalations of tickets which break that system.
Once a dispatcher is in place, the dynamic shifts immediately. Senior technicians get to focus. Clients get a consistent voice on the phone and a predictable process behind every ticket. SLAs that used to lapse become managed. Critical incidents get escalated through a defined procedure instead of landing randomly on whoever picks up. And the “cry wolf” problem disappears: when a client calls and actually has an urgent issue, the dispatcher can actually treat it as urgent because the rest of the noise is filtered out.
Having placed dozens of dispatchers in MSPs and helped them with the SOPs and knowledge needed to integrate them, we have seen truly transformational results for MSPs. We’ve seen service desk managers and MSP owners who suddenly felt back in their power. We’ve seen technicians cancel their notice periods when hope of being able to do actual work miraculously returned. We’ve seen MSPs come back from the brink of collapse.
The Bottom Line
Get rid of the ring group. Put a dispatcher or service coordinator in between your calls and your techs. Set the expectation with clients about what happens when they email versus when they call, and then deliver on it consistently every single time. Your technicians will stop burning out. Your clients will stop getting a different experience every time they call. And your help desk will finally deliver the consistent, proactive service you’ve been promising all along.
The chaos isn’t a sign that you care more. It’s a sign that you haven’t built a mature system yet and given your staff what they need for ongoing stability and success.
0 Comments