Here’s a number that should make every MSP take notice: around 40% of tickets start on the phone.
And every 30-minute call piles on at least 10 more minutes of administrative work: note-taking, triaging, categorizing. None of it creates value. It’s wasted technician time. Across a team, that’s hundreds of hours every month that could be spent resolving real issues or working billable projects.
The phone is the single most expensive support channel in your business.
Yet most MSPs still treat it like a black box. Calls happen, notes are hit-or-miss, and the real story of what your team did (and how the customer felt) gets lost to memory. For all the talk about AI and automation, the phone has remained stubbornly manual. Until now.
The service desk has evolved dramatically over the last decade. Chat, email, and ticket automations have been optimized to near perfection. Tools now sync data in real time, AI handles triage, and technicians can jump between channels without breaking stride.
But the phone hasn’t kept up.
It remains the most human, high-emotion channel in your stack—and the most costly to manage. When a customer calls, it’s usually because something is broken and urgent. The stakes are high, the pressure is real, and the documentation burden falls squarely on the technician who answered.
Here’s the irony: that call contains the richest data in your business. Customer sentiment, problem details, escalation patterns, and tone all live inside that moment. But as soon as the call ends, the details start to fade. What gets captured depends on how much time (and patience) the technician has left in their day.
This isn’t just a productivity issue—it’s a data gap. According to HDI research, more than half of all IT support teams say voice interactions provide the most context for understanding customer needs. Yet fewer than 20% are using tools that capture or analyze those calls at scale.
That means most MSPs are making business decisions without visibility into nearly half of their customer interactions.
Let’s do the math.
A 30-minute call plus 10 minutes of follow-up equals 40 minutes of total time. Multiply that by dozens of calls a day, across a 10-technician team, and you’re burning hundreds of non-billable hours every month just to document what already happened.
That’s time your engineers could be solving tickets, improving documentation, or working on proactive projects. Instead, they’re playing transcriptionist.
The inefficiency compounds across teams:
The problem isn’t the phone. It’s everything that happens after it rings. Calls are real time, high emotion, and usually urgent. Every time the phone rings, technicians stop what they’re doing, take the call, and then burn another 10 minutes logging it afterward. It’s invisible labor that quietly erodes your margins.
Voice is the hidden tax on every MSP service desk and the next frontier for automation.
These are the reasons we built Thread Voice AI.
It takes the chaos of phone support and transforms it into clean, actionable data instantly. No typing. No swivel-chairing. No missed context.
Here’s how it works:
Every call is captured, transcribed, categorized, and logged automatically inside your PSA. That means complete visibility across calls, accurate tickets every time, and real-time performance insights for your entire service operation.
Voice AI doesn’t just record the conversation. It gives your desk memory, structure, and speed. The result? A smoother customer experience, happier technicians, and a healthier margin.
When you think about service optimization, the goal isn’t just to answer calls faster—it’s to learn from them.
Without call data, your reports only tell half the story. You might see trends in ticket categories or SLA breaches, but not why they happen. You miss the nuance of tone when a client’s frustration builds, or when a loyal customer hints at dissatisfaction long before they churn.
Imagine knowing which clients are calling the most, which issues trigger repeat calls, and which types of requests eat the most technician time. Imagine surfacing call patterns that reveal where automation can have the biggest impact.
That’s what modern MSPs are moving toward: service desks that listen, learn, and respond with insight—not guesswork.
So yes, the phone is ringing. The only question is, Will you answer the call?