How Tigerhawk Technologies Cut Ticket Turnaround Time in Half and Freed Their Team to Do the Work They Love

Tigerhawk Technologies is a six-technician MSP based in Quincy, IL, with offices serving Hannibal, MO and the greater St. Louis area. Their client base spans small and mid-sized businesses across industries, with roughly a third of clients in healthcare, primarily nursing facilities.

JR Bareis, CEO, built Tigerhawk around a leadership philosophy as much as a technology one: empower the team to do the work they love, clear the friction that stands in their way, and the results follow. That conviction shaped everything he decided about Thread.

"I call it (Thread) the AI time generation machine because it created so much time for us." — JR Bareis, CEO | Tigerhawk Technologies

Tigerhawk entered 2026 with a clear internal goal: get the average remote ticket turnaround time below 30 minutes. They called it Mission 2026. When JR mapped out why tickets were slow, the answer wasn't a single system failure. It was friction, everywhere, concentrated at intake.

The Core Problem: Tickets were arriving without enough information for technicians to begin work, forcing outbound clarifying calls before any troubleshooting could start.

"We had a ticket that said: 'it only cuts out when I push the buttons.' That was the whole ticket." — JR Bareis, CEO | Tigerhawk Technologies

 

That ticket required a phone call to learn it was a desk phone with a loose cable. The tech scheduled an on-site visit. The entire intake exchange cost real time, and none of it logged to the PSA.

• Technicians made outbound calls to gather basic context, adding zero time to their utilization numbers
• Incoming call volume ran 700-800 per month, with 14% hitting voicemail and generating duplicate follow-up tickets
• Incomplete tickets inflated the queue with noise, requiring a monthly purge of 50-60 redundant records
• No dedicated dispatcher meant triage depended on whoever happened to check the queue

Tigerhawk needed an intake layer that could ask the right questions automatically, route the ticket correctly, and get the technician to work without a phone call in between.

Thread was deployed as Tigerhawk's AI service desk layer, connecting Thread Messenger to Autotask and handling structured ticket intake across the client base.

JR named the Thread's AI triage agent,  "Jay" and introduced him to clients as a digital teammate. The rollout started with rule-based routing in the background: Jay organized incoming tickets and sorted them into remote, on-site, and project queues in Autotask. From there, the team expanded Jay's role to include clarifying conversations at intake, automated categorization, and client-facing updates throughout the ticket lifecycle.

JR introduced Jay to clients one at a time during quarterly business reviews, walking leadership through what Jay would do before any deployment. For clients who expressed concern about AI, he kept the pitch grounded in outcome.

"You already trust me with your data. I'm telling you this is a tool we're using to help us be better. I want your average remote ticket resolved in under 30 minutes, not 90." — JR Bareis, CEO | Tigerhawk Technologies

For the roughly third of clients in healthcare settings where Teams or Slack was not in regular use, the desktop messenger solved the channel problem entirely.

Today, Jay handles the intake conversation that used to require a phone call.

A client types a request into the Jay messenger. Jay asks the clarifying questions, gathers context, routes the ticket to the correct queue in Autotask, and confirms back to the client that their issue is being handled. When notes are added or the ticket is closed, Jay notifies the client automatically. Technicians open the ticket already knowing what the issue is, what device is involved, and whether the response requires remote or on-site work.

"People will type things into a computer they would never say out loud. They'll ask Jay for things they would never ask a human for, even though a human ends up with all of it on the back end." — JR Bareis, CEO | Tigerhawk Technologies

The team runs three primary queues: remote, on-site, and project. Jay routes incoming tickets automatically. Early routing errors, like printer tickets landing in the remote queue, were corrected as the team tuned the rules. JR calls that period Jay's onboarding.

Day in the Life

A client at a nursing facility opens the Jay messenger on her desktop and types that her desk phone cuts out when she pushes buttons. Jay asks her to confirm whether the issue involves a computer, laptop, tablet, or desk phone. She confirms desk phone. Jay responds that it sounds like a cable issue and tells her a technician will be in touch to schedule an on-site visit. A structured ticket lands in the on-site queue in Autotask. The technician picks it up, already knows what they need, and closes the job. Jay sends the client a confirmation when the ticket resolves. No outbound call. No voicemail. No duplicate ticket created because she never heard back.

Tigerhawk Technologies Halved Its Ticket Turnaround Time and Gave the Team Room to Breathe

At the end of last year, Tigerhawk's average remote ticket turnaround time was 1 hour 24 minutes. Through Q1, as volume grew, it climbed to 1 hour 37 minutes. In April, as Jay began routing tickets and handling intake conversations, it came back down to 1 hour 20 minutes. By May, with Jay installed on client computers and running full intake, it had fallen to the mid-40s.  Mission 2026 is still in progress. JR shows no sign of slowing down.

The phone story is sharper still. Monthly call volume dropped from 700-800 calls to approximately 450 as clients shifted to Jay for intake. Voicemail, which had claimed 14% of all calls, now captures less than 0.25%. Tigerhawk publishes its live call answer rate on the company website: 99.8%.

Technician utilization crossed 90% for the first time, up from a 2025 average of 60-65%. Fewer intake calls, cleaner queues, and automated client updates meant technicians could spend significantly more time on billable work. Tigerhawk still runs a six-person team.

"A year ago, people here didn't even have conversations with each other because they were so damn busy. Now I hear two people laughing outside that door. That shift happened in 60 days." — JR Bareis, CEO | Tigerhawk Technologies

CSAT sits at 100%, published live on the Tigerhawk website alongside their turnaround and call answer metrics.

Did Thread reduce ticket turnaround time? Yes. Tigerhawk went from a Q1 peak of 1 hour 37 minutes to 50-51 minutes at the time of this interview, a reduction of approximately 40%. The goal of sub-30 minutes remains active.

Did Thread reduce phone volume? Yes. Monthly calls fell from 700-800 to approximately 450, a reduction of more than 40%.

Did Thread eliminate voicemail? Effectively yes. The voicemail rate fell from 14% to under 0.25%.

Did Thread improve technician efficiency? Yes. Utilization climbed from 60-65% to above 90%, without adding headcount.

For JR Bareis, Mission 2026 was never only about the numbers. It was about building a team that could actually do the work they were hired to do. Thread gave Tigerhawk back the time that intake friction had been consuming: the clarifying calls, the voicemails, the one-line tickets that required a conversation before troubleshooting could begin. What he found on the other side was a service desk where the queue was cleaner, the phones were quieter, and two of his technicians could stand in the hallway for 10 minutes and laugh without anyone feeling like they were falling behind.

Takeaway: Tigerhawk Technologies shows that MSPs running Autotask can cut ticket turnaround time by roughly 40%, reduce phone volume by more than 40%, and drive technician utilization above 90% by deploying Thread as their AI service desk intake layer, without adding headcount or replacing the tools their team already knows.