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Learn how Five Star Technology used Thread to improve bandwidth for on-campus IT teams and provide educators with far speedier support:

• 10–15 minutes for average ticket resolution
• 98% improvement in ticket response time
• 37% of tickets resolved remotely

“If you could work with a service to respond to your clientele in just two minutes, resolve almost 40% of their issues, and save yourself thousands of dollars, wouldn’t you do it? That’s what working with Thread is like. It’s an absolute no-brainer.” - Nathan Davidson, VP of Managed Services at Five Star Technology 

About

Five Star Technology partners with school districts to support transformative learning experiences through technology. To do this, the Google for Education partner offers powerful dashboards that help schools visualize their most important data and make informed decisions on student engagement, learning loss, and more. 

Challenge

Five Star Tech needed to become a managed IT service provider for the modern American classroom

Technology is pervasive in modern American classrooms: 94% of students have technology available a majority of the time for educational purposes. However, the service stack had not enabled MSPs to provide IT help experiences that scaled with this growth. Schools are lucky to have one technician in each building, and even then, that person can only address one issue at a time. When teachers and students constantly wait for devices to be fixed or networks to come back online, the classroom is stalled — and learning comes to a halt. 

Nathan Davidson, VP of Managed Services at Five Star Tech, explains that when the company launched, his team knew they needed a serious solution to power their service offerings. Critically, that solution needed to be effortless for teachers to use; after all, they already have enough on their plates.

Five Star Tech realized a live chat tool was ideal, so the team began shopping around the market. Thread was the only solution they tried that seamlessly connected teachers with technicians. It was exactly what they needed. 

Solution

Putting Thread on every teacher’s computer to streamline service

After an easy onboarding, Thread immediately leveled up Five Star Tech’s client support. By installing Thread on every teacher’s desktop, they brought real-time tech service to classrooms across 20+ school districts. Now, when an educator needs help, they can reach out (via Thread) on the platform of their choice from Slack to the Google Chromebook desktop app. 

Then, the platform automatically generates a ticket. Five Star Tech’s remote IT support can seamlessly collaborate on these requests from their shared universal inbox. If needed, a technician can even easily escalate more urgent issues to the right team member for faster resolution. 

Thread’s AI-powered CoPilot further speeds up the process for Five Star Tech’s employees by automating tedious manual entries and clearing out administrative tasks. As a result, Five Star Tech only needs 4–6 virtual technicians to service nearly 8,000 tickets with Thread. 

Even better, they’ve never sacrificed their high-quality customer experience: Five Star Tech boasts an almost 100% customer satisfaction rate. According to Nathan, many teachers are so pleased with their Five Star Tech support that they’ve sent in extensive feedback, raving about how quickly and easily their issues were resolved. 

“I can't speak highly enough of our partnership with Thread. It’s a two-way street where we work in lock-step to improve our service offerings.”

Results

Thanks to Thread, Five Star Tech resolves tickets in less than 15 minutes, making teachers’ lives easier

Since partnering with Thread, Five Star Tech can better support the modern classroom with dramatically faster response times. 

This is critical because teachers can’t just wait on the phone for the next technician to become available. Now, thanks to Thread, they don’t have to. Five Star Tech can rapidly address tickets — both on-campus and remotely — and teachers can get back to their lessons sooner. 

Here’s a snapshot of the results so far: 

• 10–15 minutes for average ticket resolution
• 98% improvement in ticket response time
• 37% of tickets resolved remotely

In terms of the big picture, Thread ultimately saves school districts money on tech service while preserving the jobs of in-person technicians. In fact, Nathan reports some school districts have seen significant increases in efficiency and quality of service with only one technician on-site. 

“Technicians do a phenomenal job, but they can only be in so many places simultaneously. The best tech might ordinarily resolve an issue in two hours. Since implementing Thread’s Virtual Help Desk, we’re down to a sub-two-minute response time.”