NSO used Thread to give its clients what they really wanted: chat support

Learn how NSO partnered with Thread to launch an improved chat feature and improve engineer efficiency with AI.

125% current ROI
45% improvement in service efficiency
49% improvement in time to resolution

“Thread provides far more context with each request. Having documentation from past tickets lights the way for how technicians can solve the same problem for a different customer. That speeds up the process so much.” – Raymond Heijberg, Managing Director at NSO

About

NSO is a Dutch managed service provider (MSP) helping businesses succeed with smart IT. They’re passionate about helping customers operate as quickly and safely as possible in a way that enables innovation and high performance. NSO gets recertified annually by the information security experts at Digitrust and holds the ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and NEN 7510 certifications.

Challenge

NSO saw an opportunity to increase accessibility for its customers

Raymond Heijberg, Managing Director at NSO, says his company was searching for a way to connect with a wider variety of customers. He had noticed that younger customers often avoided speaking on the phone and preferred email instead. But writing emails constantly is time-consuming, so sometimes clients neglected to write them at all.

This created a pattern where clients would let problems fester because they didn’t want to talk on the phone and lacked the time to write an email. Despite that, clients needed an accessible way to tell the NSO team when something was wrong. Raymond realized his customers needed an easier communication option. Then he found Thread.

“We realized we needed an easier, more accessible way for clients to contact us — like Thread.”

Solution

Thread’s chat and Magic AI increase NSO techs’ efficiency by 45%

NSO trialed Thread, and when engineers immediately saw the utility of adding chat to their lines of communication, they told Raymond they wanted to use the tool.

Incorporating Thread with NSO’s existing chat solution helps the team connect with their customers. Not only are they more accessible to their customers, but Thread is embedded in Microsoft Teams, so neither NSO nor their clients had to download a new platform to use chat.

Thread also allowed NSO’s techs to support multiple customers at once rather than sitting on one phone call at a time. Not only are they resolving tickets faster, but adding a third communication channel distributed NSO’s tickets to channels that fit their requests better.

NSO loves how Thread’s Magic AI automatically categorizes and prioritizes tickets. Techs know what sort of request they’re dealing with at a glance, so they always attend to the highest priority tickets first. The AI also summarizes information from past calls for helpful, easy-to-skim documentation that doesn’t require added effort from techs.
Raymond says chat is particularly appealing for customers who are less likely to pick up a phone but are happy to send a chat message.

“Using Thread has made us much more accessible to clients. They aren’t forced to phone or email us. And Thread is embedded in Teams, so it’s the simplest thing for us and our clients to use.”

Results

Incorporating Thread helped NSO provide better service to customers

Thread’s service dashboard shortened NSO’s entire ticket timeline from when a request arrives to its resolution by eliminating context and program switching between steps. Thread’s AI ticket notation also saves time because engineers can see how other technicians resolved similar past tickets. Techs no longer have to take the time to create this documentation themselves, and the Magic AI ensures that notes are consistent across tickets.

And the results?

125% current ROI
45% improvement in service efficiency
49% improvement in time to resolution

NSO looks forward to continuing its partnership with Thread as the platform innovates and expands its chat functionality. NSO’s engineers are most excited to see Thread exploring the use of AI for auto-translation because their engineers prefer to communicate in Dutch and often receive requests in English.

“Thread is very interactive and helps us fully resolve requests. So it shortens the whole timeline from somebody having a support question to it being solved.”