How Acrisure Replaced a 24/7 Answering Service and Now Handles 300 Calls a Day Through Thread Voice

Acrisure is a managed services provider serving approximately 150 clients, with a 30-person service desk that operates out of Microsoft Teams and ConnectWise Manage. The team runs a structured tiered support model, with a fast-track level one team focused on first touch, a dispatch function, and an escalation path up through senior engineers.

As Acrisure grew through organic expansion and the absorption of two additional MSPs, call volume became one of the biggest operational pressures the service desk faced. Craig Wilde, Assistant Service Manager, leads the team responsible for service delivery and has been at the center of Acrisure's automation and AI adoption from the start.

Acrisure's inbound call volume had grown beyond what its internal team could absorb. Dispatchers and technicians were answering phones alongside handling tickets, and as client count climbed, that model stopped working.

The team turned to a 24/7 third-party answering service to handle intake. The service worked around the clock, created tickets during business hours, and escalated emergencies through a dedicated P1 line. But as call volume kept growing, new problems emerged.

The Core Problem: The third party was creating tickets with incomplete or missing information, and those tickets were getting lost before a technician ever touched them.

"Sometimes the tickets would come across without information. It was just a constant flow, and those tickets would get lost." — Craig Wilde

Specific friction points the team was managing:

• Inaccurate or missing ticket information required dispatchers to follow up before work could begin
• Simple tickets that should have taken 15 minutes were sitting for over an hour before a technician touched them
• Clients learned to abuse the P1 escalation line, flooding the emergency channel with low-priority issues
• Third-party costs kept rising as call volume grew with each MSP acquisition

The team needed a solution that was faster, more accurate, and built to scale.

Thread Voice was deployed as Acrisure's AI-powered call intake layer, replacing the third-party answering service entirely and routing all inbound calls directly into ConnectWise Manage.

Craig had been involved with Thread since early in the company's history and had been working with the voice agent from its earliest stages. When it was ready, the decision to move away from the external vendor was straightforward.

Thread now handles every inbound call. The voice agent captures the caller's information, structures the ticket, and creates it in the PSA, all without a dispatcher in the loop. For the highest-volume request types, Thread intents trigger automated flows in Rewst, resolving issues like password resets and group additions before any human touch is required.

The rollout to the team was direct. Craig told his technicians the change was happening, ran demos to show them what the agent could do, and set up a Teams channel for ongoing feedback. He also introduced a weekly pod structure, breaking the 30-person team into smaller groups for short sessions on new Thread capabilities each Friday.

Today, every inbound call to Acrisure flows through Thread Voice before anything else happens.

Acrisure runs four separate voice agents: a main line, a dedicated line for their largest client, a line for a recently absorbed MSP that still handles its own calls, and a sales line. The main line uses Thread's overflow mode. The largest client line uses an attendant flow with two options, both routing to overflow, with an immediate callback flag for nurse password resets so no one is blocked from logging in.

Once a call ends, the ticket lands in ConnectWise with the context already structured. Dispatchers review the board to push the most urgent work out faster, but they are no longer doing the intake work that used to sit between the call and the technician.

"The workflow used to be: a phone call comes in, the third party creates a ticket, dispatch touches it, dispatch decides where it goes. A simple 15-minute ticket could take more than an hour before a tech even touched it. Now the bot goes through, it records everything, and the techs go in and grab the ticket off the board."

— Craig Wilde

A day in the life: A nurse at Acrisure's largest client calls in because she cannot log in. Thread's voice agent answers, identifies the issue, and creates the ticket. The intent recognizes a password reset request and flags it for immediate callback. A technician sees the ticket with full context already populated and calls back within minutes. No dispatcher has touched it. No information is missing. The nurse is back to work.

Craig also reviews the Thread analytics dashboard every Friday after his pod calls, looking at where auto prioritization, auto categorization, and auto summaries are falling short, and adjusting from there. The dashboard agent helps him dig into problem areas and surfaces technician-level feedback, including one instance where it told him a low-sentiment ticket was not the technician's fault at all but the team's slow initial response.

Acrisure Eliminated Its Third-Party Answering Service and Now Handles Every Call Through Thread

Thread's voice agent now handles approximately 300 calls per day across Acrisure's lines. That volume, which once required a 24/7 external vendor and still produced incomplete tickets and lost work, flows entirely through Thread.

The accuracy improvement was immediate. Where the third party regularly sent over tickets without enough information to act on, Thread captures and structures everything during the call. Technicians arrive at the ticket ready to work.

Resolution speed improved as well. Tickets that used to sit idle for over an hour while dispatch triaged and routed them now move directly from the call to the board. For password resets and group additions, the resolution often happens before a technician is involved at all.

CSAT improved alongside the operational gains. Craig points to speed as the driver: clients who used to wait while their ticket sat in a queue are now getting responses faster, and the information they gave the voice agent is not being lost in a handoff.

The cost calculus shifted too. The third-party answering service was an ongoing expense that scaled with call volume. Thread replaces it at a better cost per call, with better accuracy and without the overhead of managing a vendor relationship.

Did Thread eliminate the need for a third-party answering service? Yes. Acrisure dropped their external vendor after deploying Thread Voice and now handles 100% of inbound calls through the agent.

Did ticket quality improve? Yes. Incomplete and missing ticket information was a chronic problem with the third party. Thread captures context during the call and creates structured tickets in ConnectWise Manage.

Did time to technician improve? Yes. Tickets that previously waited over an hour for a dispatcher to triage and route now land on the board immediately after the call ends.

For Acrisure, the decision to replace a 24/7 answering service with Thread's voice agent was not just an operational change. It was a bet on accuracy, speed, and the ability to scale without adding vendor overhead.

The results have validated that bet. Three hundred calls a day move through Thread. Technicians work from tickets that actually contain the right information. Common issues resolve without anyone picking up the phone. And Craig is already planning the next step: a tier structure where level-one work is supervised by a human whose job is to make sure the AI is doing it correctly, freeing senior engineers to focus on the problems that actually need them.

"Go in with an open mind. If you keep an open mind of what it can do, it's going to make life so much easier." — Craig Wilde, Assistant Service Manager | Acrisure

Takeaway: Acrisure shows that MSPs using ConnectWise can eliminate third-party answering service costs, improve ticket accuracy, and scale call intake to 300+ calls per day by deploying Thread Voice as their AI-powered front line, without retraining their team or adding headcount.