How XFER Communications Put Thread's AI on 28,000+ Tickets Without Leaving ConnectWise

XFER Communications is an 18-technician MSP based in Livonia, Michigan that provides managed IT, cybersecurity, cloud, and business phone services to small and medium-sized businesses. Its clients include nonprofits, automotive dealerships, credit unions, manufacturers, schools, and accounting firms. Service Manager Josh Campbell, who has been with XFER for 10 years, runs a ConnectWise Manage service desk that supports roughly 100 managed clients. Nearly all of those clients run Microsoft 365, which shaped how Josh thought about where support should happen.

"People are chatting in Teams. It's just the next step we want to take in the evolution of getting tickets to us." — Josh Campbell, Service Manager, XFER Communications

Before Thread, tickets reached XFER by phone or email, and both channels ended in the same place: a technician reading, fixing, and chasing details before any real work could begin. Six help desk technicians answered calls while juggling the inbox, and end users heard back through ConnectWise's canned "we got your ticket" replies. XFER wanted a faster, more modern front door that met users where they already worked, without adding more manual steps for the team.

The Core Problem

Every ticket needed several minutes of hands-on triage and back-and-forth before a technician could start solving it.

"Everything from start to finish was a manual process. We spent three to five minutes first triaging, fixing, and tweaking the ticket, responding back to the customer, making sure we had all the right information we needed before we could move forward." — Josh Campbell, Service Manager, XFER Communications

 

• Tickets arrived only through phone and email, with no real-time channel for end users
• Help desk technicians split their attention between ringing phones and a growing inbox
• Each ticket took three to five minutes of manual cleanup before work began
• Missing details meant repeated follow-ups with end users

XFER was about a month away from turning on ConnectWise's bundled chat when they took a second look at Thread.

Thread was deployed as XFER's AI service desk layer, connecting Microsoft Teams to ConnectWise Manage and automating ticket intake, triage, and prioritization.

Josh had already configured ConnectWise chat and was ready to flip the switch. After another demo, XFER chose Thread instead, both for the chat experience and for the pace of improvements since. The deciding factor was the Teams app: end users could open, follow, and reply to tickets in a white-labeled XFER support app without visiting a portal.

On day one, XFER turned on Thread's AI ticket summaries, categorization, and prioritization. The Magic Agent triage agent came next, rolled out gradually. By April 2025, XFER had Thread's AI running on 118 client companies, a record for its onboarding cohort, and Messenger live for its first 15 to 17 clients.

"We did a slow roll with the agent. I wish we had gone faster. I wish we had just turned that on." — Josh Campbell, Service Manager, XFER Communications

Josh then rebuilt XFER's ConnectWise statuses around the AI. After nine and a half years on largely the same statuses, the board now has dedicated statuses for tickets the triage agent is working, plus statuses that route approvals automatically, so nothing sits in a generic "waiting on client" bucket. From there, the team mapped its most common ticket types and kept building new intents for the agent.

Every ticket that arrives by chat or email now touches XFER's triage agent first. The agent talks with the end user, gathers the information a technician would otherwise chase, and attempts troubleshooting where it makes sense. The ticket then drops into the help desk queue with the right priority and notes attached.

A second layer of agents runs once a ticket reaches that queue, checking for urgent deadlines and flagging duplicate tickets that should be merged. The help desk works the ticket and escalates anything it can't resolve to XFER's dispatcher, who routes it to Tier 2.

Josh trained the team through a mix of Thread-led sessions and his own one-on-ones. Technicians work in Thread's Inbox or in the Thread pods inside ConnectWise, and use Super Magic to draft ticket notes and log time entries. The rollout message was simple: Thread is another tool, not a new system to learn from scratch.

"It still has the same feel. We're not pulling you out of ConnectWise, so if you need to jump back in, you can. You don't have to go all in. It's just another tool we want you to use." — Josh Campbell, Service Manager, XFER Communications

For end users, the change is that support now lives in Teams. Tickets they open by email also appear in the XFER app in Teams, where they can check status and message the technician directly.

Day in the Life

An office manager at a client company opens Teams and messages XFER's support app: Outlook won't sync. The triage agent replies within seconds, asks a few targeted questions, and walks her through a basic fix. When that doesn't clear it, the agent creates a ConnectWise ticket with the device, the error, the steps already tried, and a priority. A follow-up agent checks it against open tickets and finds no duplicate. A help desk technician picks it up with everything in hand and replies to her in the same Teams chat.

The Results

XFER Achieved AI Triage at Scale Across Its Client Base

By its August 2026 business review, Thread's AI had touched roughly 28,000 to 29,000 XFER tickets in 2026, and the triage agent alone had engaged on about 17,000 of them. Usage showed no declining trends, and XFER was active on all seven Thread solutions tracked for its account, including Magic Agent, Magic AI, Chat, Ask Magic, and Flows.

For technicians, the three to five minutes of up-front cleanup each ticket used to need now happens before the ticket reaches them. For end users, a support conversation starts in Teams instead of a phone queue or an email thread. For the business, XFER is turning that foundation into its next goal: automating dispatch.

"Once we saw the questions it was asking, the troubleshooting, it resolving an Outlook ticket or a basic ticket, we just knew the possibilities were endless." — Josh Campbell, Service Manager, XFER Communications

Did Thread reduce manual triage for technicians? Yes. Every chat and email ticket now passes through XFER's triage agent first, which has engaged on about 17,000 tickets in 2026 so far, replacing three to five minutes of hands-on triage per ticket.

Did XFER have to replace ConnectWise? No. Thread runs on top of ConnectWise Manage, and technicians can work in Thread's Inbox or stay in ConnectWise with Thread pods.

Did end users adopt chat? Yes. XFER has chat deployed to 66 client companies, most of them through Microsoft Teams.

XFER didn't add AI to its service desk as an experiment. It rebuilt intake around it. By choosing Thread over the chat tool already bundled with its PSA, XFER gave end users a support channel inside Teams and gave its help desk tickets that arrive ready to work. The triage agent now handles the questions technicians used to chase, and a second layer of agents keeps the queue clean. With that foundation in place, Josh and his 18 technicians are pointing the same approach at dispatch, the next bottleneck on their list.

Takeaway: XFER shows that MSPs using ConnectWise Manage can put AI triage on every incoming ticket by deploying Thread as their AI service desk layer, without replacing their existing tools or retraining their team.