After-hours support is one of those decisions that shapes your team culture, your margins, and your client experience all at once. Get it wrong and you burn out your best people. Get it right and it becomes a competitive advantage.
Before we get into the methods, ask yourself one question first: do you actually need after-hours support? Many MSPs try to manage it when none of their clients actually require 24/7 coverage. The easiest way to manage after-hours is to not do it at all. You could always have someone start an early shift a few hours before support hours and handle any overnight issues then.
If you do need it, here are five approaches ranked from worst to best.
The Shared Inbox
The worst method I see is the shared inbox. The whole team is asked to keep an eye on the emergency support inbox and action anything that comes through. What inevitably happens is the owner is the only one who closely monitors that inbox and grows frustrated that no one else is acting on it.
If everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.
Rotating Shifts
A single person is assigned the on-call role and fields all incoming calls. This is better since a single point of contact is established, but the burden on your team culture is high. Teams try to manage this by compensating the on-call person for their time. That can help, but the impact is real, especially during periods where they get woken up several times a night.
The Late Shift
Instead of waking people up, some teams hire someone to work an after-hours shift. Remote work has made this more accessible. At least someone is available who was hired with this expectation and isn’t being pulled out of bed.
The difficulty is that managing this person’s off-hours productivity is often problematic. They don’t get much individual attention from management, and in many cases the ROI on this resource is highly suspect.
Answering Service
My favorite solution for smaller teams. Have a call answering service ask one very specific question: “Is this an emergency? Do you need someone to call you right away, or can this wait until the morning?”
Most often the user is fine waiting until morning. This single question can reduce your after-hours escalations by 70-80%. When it is a genuine emergency, the answering service calls through a priority contact list to get someone to respond.
This approach is dramatically cheaper than staffing for after-hours and produces a much lower volume of escalations. There are still absolutely escalations, so some impact on the team exists, but it’s manageable.
Outsourced Help Desk
I’m a big fan of outsourced help desks for most MSPs, big or small. It isn’t magic. You can’t remove all your support problems by outsourcing to someone else. It requires management and tons of documentation. Your runbooks, escalation paths, and client-specific procedures need to be solid before you hand anything off.
But once you have good documentation, offloading after-hours support is dead simple. Then you get the added benefit of being able to flex and grow using the outsourced partner instead of spending time on hiring. A strong, well-managed in-house team is crucial for success, but if you want to cover after-hours and offload routine work to a partner, it’s a great option.
The Right Choice Depends on Your Size
There’s no universal answer here. A 10-person MSP with zero 24/7 clients shouldn’t be staffing a night shift. A 40-person shop with enterprise accounts probably needs the outsourced desk. Match the method to your actual client requirements and team size, not to what you think you should be doing.