At my last company in early 2022, I made one of those decisions that operators pretend is strategic, but really feels more like jumping off a cliff and hoping to land on something soft.
We decided to rewrite the way our MSP handled support.
No more slow ticket queues.
No more emails lost in the void.
No more clients wondering if anyone was listening.
We wanted support to feel human, fast and modern. So we took a swing and launched full Slack and Microsoft Teams based support. Clients could message us the same way they communicated internally. Real time. Zero friction.
To make that work, we hired five remote engineers across the country. It was our first fully distributed support team, and it cracked open a talent pool we had never accessed before.
I expected the investment to improve response times. I did not expect it to change our culture. These remote engineers brought new energy. New ideas. New ways of solving problems. They challenged our assumptions and helped us rethink what “fast” and “high quality” could look like.
Alongside this shift, we also adopted Thread as a way to route Slack and Teams messages into something our engineers could manage operationally. It helped us organize the chaos and get visibility into conversations. It was not perfect, but it played a role in helping us adapt when we were moving fast.
The combination of culture and workflow changes worked.
Our response times dropped.
Clients noticed.
Engineers felt more engaged.
Eventually, we brought our average lead time down to five minutes.
But it came with a price.
The day we committed to this new support model, our burn jumped by roughly twenty five thousand dollars per month. Five new salaries. New tools. More operational overhead. All of it hit long before we saw any revenue lift.
It was a huge financial risk.
And it was based more on conviction than strategy.
We eventually added new clients who justified the investment. But honestly, it was not because we marketed this capability. We barely talked about it publicly. We just quietly built something better and hoped people would feel the difference.
Most MSPs cannot take that kind of gamble.
And even if they can, sustaining it month after month is another story.
People love to say MSPs are slow to adopt new technology. I disagree.
MSPs move at the speed their systems allow them to move.
Most PSA and helpdesk tools were never designed for the way modern communication actually happens. Slack and Teams run the business world. Yet MSP workflows still revolve around ticket systems that look and behave like they were built in another era.
We forced these worlds together with labor. Most MSPs cannot.
That is the problem we faced. And it is the problem we are now working to solve.
Our vision is simple. MSPs should be able to offer real time Slack and Teams support without hiring a new shift of engineers. Without taking on massive burn. Without gambling their margins on the hope that clients will eventually appreciate the faster experience.
AI can handle the first layer of interactions:
Not replacing engineers, but supporting them.
Tools like Thread showed us what was possible.
AI will make it accessible to everyone.
Slack- and Teams-based support is not a trend. It is the natural evolution of the way clients want to communicate. The real question is whether MSPs can deliver it sustainably.
We learned the hard way that the benefits are real, but the cost is punishing.
The next generation of tools will change that. And our mission is to make sure MSPs are not left out of this shift. Not this time.