Article
Every MSP report looks the same: tickets opened, tickets closed, response times, a satisfaction score. All green.
Here is what those numbers cannot tell you: whether the same printer mapping has been “fixed” eleven times this year. Whether three different people have reported the same sync problem in three different words, generating three unrelated tickets. Whether your team has quietly stopped reporting the annoying stuff because it never really gets fixed anyway.
A ticket is a unit of activity. A problem is a unit of business friction. They are not the same thing, and a provider paid to close tickets will close tickets.
The test
Pull your last five resolved tickets and ask one question about each: did the cause get fixed, or did the symptom get cleared? A password reset is a symptom. Finding out why lockouts spiked this month is a cause. Remapping a drive is a symptom. Asking why a 200-person company still depends on mapped drives is a cause.
If all five answers are “symptom,” your IT provider is running a queue, not an operation.
What good looks like
Repeat issues get grouped, named, and assigned an owner. Recurring symptoms trigger a root-cause task with a deadline, not another closure. And someone reports to leadership in plain language: here is what kept breaking, here is why, here is what we changed so it stops.
Closed tickets are fine. Closed problems are the job.
— IAN BERKOWITZ, FOUNDER & CEO, IRONGUARD IT