IT service collaboration platform Thread unveiled a new solution today called Planner, which will allow technicians and service managers to plan the service issues they’re working on in the Thread Inbox and communicate with their customers in real time, rather than having to go back out to their PSA.
Thread CEO Mark Alayev calls Planner “a really fresh way to organize your information around people.”
Planner, he says, will “elevate the game for MSPs on their ability to create a plan to resolution, to drive down time to resolution, and really meet customers, not only where they are, but when they need to be met.” Originally called Chatgenie, the MSP software startup rebranded to Thread in 2022, raising $2.7 million in funding led by Integr8d Capital and MSP veterans David Bellini and Adam Slutskin. Last November, Thread won the PitchIT contest at IT Nation Connect.
“Our goal this year is to make the technicians be able to do everything that they need to in one unified inbox,” says Alayev, “and this has been one of our most uploaded feature requests ever.” Thread currently has 200 MSP partners.
He adds, “We spent six months working on a holistic solution. We wanted to really think outside the box and go back to our roots as being MSPs [and] what really makes a magical experience for the end customer and for the tech.”
The solution “comes from a deep understanding of the pain point” MSPs have around managing capacity and utilization while delivering an excellent customer experience.
The result is Planner, which allows you to see your team’s calendar at a glance so you can prioritize, assign, and schedule threads (conversations between the customer and the technician in real time, without leaving the workflow). You can also plan threads for specific days and set exact times to ensure the right technician is assigned at the right time. Service managers can get a view of the team’s backlog to load-balance and prioritize work. You can also plan around existing calendar appointments to avoid double bookings. Finally, you can drag new threads from Triage into your “Today” board for one-click assigning and scheduling.
Planner will automatically sync with the ConnectWise and Autotask PSAs.
Alayev notes that the integration is bidirectional, “so anything that happens in ConnectWise and Autotask will also appear here, and anything that you do here [in Planner] will appear in your Autotask and ConnectWise.” Next up for PSA integration is HaloPSA, Alayev says.
“We think it’s a really big deal; it’s one of the biggest pieces that our partners and prospects ask us for,” says Bobby Jacobs, head of growth. “They say, ‘hey, you’re revolutionizing the way that we provide service, but we still have to work in this old-fashioned way as far as the scheduling and planning our tickets. … The PSA is not real time, it’s death by refresh.”
Planner brings MSPs into the modern age, Jacobs says. “One of the leading indicators of customer experience is employee experience, and if your employees aren’t having a good time—which they’re not in the PSA—then your customers aren’t having a good time. The ticket forces you to communicate through phone or email and phone is an expensive way to provide support. Emails are really bad way to provide support and so when we’re giving the PSA a facelift and providing a real time back-end interface it enables the MSP to meet the customers where they live in something like Microsoft Teams.”
Thread is also partnering with TimeZest, says Alayev. “We’ll be able to provide a first-party in-chat experience that lets people be able to schedule time with the MSP directly inside of that chat experience.”
Planner is available in beta today, with general availability expected sometime this summer.
