HelixMSP
Deflected 52% of tier-1 ticket volume to an agentic helpdesk in 10 weeks, freeing technicians for the work that actually drove client retention.
Client / Project
HelixMSP is a managed service provider with 40 technicians supporting roughly 200 small-and-medium business clients across North America. Their margin model depends on a tight ratio of clients-per-technician — and that ratio was breaking because the ticket queue was growing faster than headcount.
Problem
Roughly 60% of inbound tickets were tier-1: password resets, MFA re-enrollment, printer driver reinstalls, Microsoft 365 license assignments, VPN profile resets. Each ticket took 12-20 minutes including context-loading, but they could not be batched because they arrived around the clock and clients expected fast response. Hiring more tier-1 staff hurt margin; pushing tickets to clients hurt CSAT.
Approach
A 2-engineer Project Pod for 10 weeks. We built an agentic helpdesk layered on top of the existing PSA tool. The agent had a tightly-scoped tool set: read Microsoft 365 user state, trigger password resets via Graph API, assign or revoke licenses, lookup the client's documented runbook in IT Glue. For ambiguous tickets, the agent collected the necessary context and handed off to a human technician with a draft response already prepared.
The critical design decision was scoping the agent's write permissions per-client. Each MSP client had a different risk profile, and the agent's authority to act autonomously was configured at the tenant level — some clients allowed full self-service, others required human approval for any write action.
Outcome
The agent now handles 52% of tier-1 ticket volume end-to-end, with another 23% getting a fully-drafted response that a technician approves with a single click. Median time-to-resolution on tier-1 tickets dropped from 18 minutes to under 2. The MSP added 35 new client seats over the next quarter without adding tier-1 headcount — the unit economics of MSP work just shifted underneath them.