Extra hands, same help desk
Most internal IT teams don't struggle with hard problems. They struggle with volume. Password resets, new-hire setups, printer issues and slow-laptop tickets crowd out the work only they can do. When someone is sick or on vacation, the queue grows. After 6 p.m., there is often nobody at all.
A co-managed help desk puts our technicians behind your team. Users contact IT the same way they do today. Tickets land in a shared queue, and routing rules your team approves decide which ones we take.
Ways to split the work
- Overflow: your team works the queue first. Tickets that sit unassigned past a threshold you set roll to us.
- Tier 1 first: we take first contact and common fixes, and escalate anything that needs local knowledge or a business decision.
- After-hours and weekends: your team covers business hours and we cover evenings, weekends and holidays, so nobody on your staff carries a phone every night.
- By category: we own specific types of work, such as onboarding and offboarding, device setup or Microsoft 365 account issues, and your team owns the rest.
Most clients use a mix. A common path is to start with after-hours coverage, then add overflow once both teams trust the handoffs.
Who does what
Here is a sample responsibility matrix for a typical help desk split. R means responsible for doing the work, A means accountable and approves, C means consulted, I means kept informed. Yours will reflect your team and your preferences.
| Task | Your IT team | Sentry Cloud IT |
|---|---|---|
| Password resets and account unlocks | A | R |
| New-hire and leaver setup | A (approves access) | R (accounts, devices, licenses) |
| Evening, weekend and holiday tickets | I (morning summary) | R |
| Line-of-business application issues | R, A | C (first look and notes) |
| Recurring problems and root cause | A | R (investigation and write-up) |
| Changes to servers, firewall or permissions | A | R only when assigned |
| User priorities and communication | R, A | I |
Backup when your team is out
Small IT teams have a single point of failure: the person who knows how everything works. We reduce that risk in two ways. During onboarding we document your environment in a shared knowledge base, so procedures don't live only in someone's head. And because our technicians already work your tickets, they can cover a vacation, a medical leave or a resignation without starting cold.
If your IT lead leaves, we can keep things steady while you hire. When the new person starts, we walk them through the environment, the documentation and the open work, so they're productive sooner.
How we keep it consistent
- We follow your runbooks, naming conventions and approval rules, not ours.
- Every ticket we touch has notes your team can read and act on, written for a technician rather than for a billing report.
- Anything that needs judgment about your business goes to your team, along with what we've found so far.
- Morning handoff notes summarize overnight activity, so your staff start the day knowing what happened.
- We track recurring issues and bring them to your IT lead, because fixing the cause beats closing the same ticket every week.
What we need from you
A named contact on your team for escalations, access to your ticketing system or agreement to use ours, admin rights scoped to the work we're assigned, and an hour or two of your IT lead's time during onboarding. After that, the time we save your team should be far more than the time we ask for.
Questions about help desk & after-hours
Will users know they're talking to an outside company?
That's your call. Some clients introduce us as part of the IT team; others prefer to say an IT partner handles after-hours calls. Either way, we use your processes and escalation rules, so the experience stays consistent.
Can we start with after-hours coverage only?
Yes, and many teams do. It's easy to define, takes pressure off your staff right away and lets both teams learn how handoffs work before adding daytime overflow.
