Connect Service Solutions handles IT, HR, legal and accounting support for a growing roster of companies, from headquarters staff to Connect Service Solutions roofing technicians in the field. As its client base expanded, ticket volume kept climbing and the IT team had no room to hire. With Robin by Atera resolving routine requests end to end, the team absorbed twice the workload, kept its SLAs intact and got its technicians back to strategic work.

The challenge: growth outpacing a small team

Connect Service Solutions (CSS) provides operational and technical support for a multitude of companies under one roof: accounting, HR, legal and IT. Its service desk covers a wide range of end users, from Connect Service Solutions roofing technicians working off phones and tablets on job sites to executives and office staff at headquarters, plus more than 100 remote employees.

Before Atera, that support ran on manual processes and a home-built system. As CSS’s client companies grew, ticket volume grew with them. The team stayed stuck in a reactive posture. There was no time for proactive projects and no room to plan ahead. They had just enough capacity to keep the queue moving.

“We had a small support staff and a ticket volume that just kept increasing and we were unable to do any proactive work, work on any systems, or make any initiatives. We were just stuck in a very reactive position,” said Angi Roberts, IT Manager at CSS.

Adding headcount wasn’t on the table. CSS needed a platform that could absorb the growth on its own.

The solution: an AI technician on every ticket

CSS chose Atera for the full platform. It combines remote support, security patching, and ticketing in one system. The platform still allowed the customization their workflows needed. Not long after onboarding, the team adopted Robin by Atera, the platform’s AI technician. Robin took on the routine, repeatable work that was consuming technician time.

“Robin is really like having another tier one technician. Every ticket that comes in, Robin diagnoses in real-time. It queries the user autonomously on the path to resolving the ticket. If Robin can’t resolve the ticket, it escalates to a technician. All the context is documented and the user information is collected. This saves us tremendous time on triage,” Roberts said

For a technician like Reese Brown, that changes the whole shape of the workday.

“Currently, I’m utilizing Robin to work as essentially my personal assistant so that way whenever the ticket gets to me, I’m not having to worry about it being half diagnosed,” said Reece Brown, IT Technician at CSS. “I know that Robin has already done a lot of the legwork upfront for me, so that way whenever I get into it, I know exactly where to start and get straight to work.”

“The task I’m most glad that Robin owns right now is probably going to be password resets because that’s something that comes up very often with people,” Brown said. “.Those sorts of things Robin handles with a breeze and it honestly gets resolved without us even knowing most of the time.”

Robin isn’t limited to a chat window. CSS built Robin into a desktop app, a Microsoft Teams integration and a web link, and put a shortcut to Robin on the homepage of company iPhones and iPads.

Robin also connects into the tools CSS already runs on. The team integrated Robin with its Microsoft tenant to find user accounts and reset passwords, with its Salesforce tenant so end users needing a Salesforce password reset can go through Robin too, and with monday.com so tickets that need engineering follow-through can live as a tracked project there as well.

Beyond the service desk

What surprised CSS most was how far Robin’s usefulness reached past IT. Across the company, employees started bringing Robin into their day-to-day work, not just their tech problems.

Kelly McGrew, a corporate paralegal who handles contracts, demands and litigation across the 14 companies CSS supports, uses Robin to pull specific information out of long documents in seconds instead of searching manually.

“Before Robin, I spent a majority of my day searching through documents and emails just to find specific information,” McGrew said. “Now that I have Robin, I can put it in and within seconds I have the information needed and it is so much faster and all the information is very reliable.”

Rachel Mooney is Director of Risk Management. She uses Robin for small breakages. These used to mean a Teams message to IT, then a wait.

“Before Robin, if I had an issue, I typically ran up the stairs and yelled, ‘Hey IT guys, I need your help.’ And now I can ask Robin for help before I go upstairs,” Mooney said. “Robin has empowered me to be more self-sufficient.”

Even employees who started out hesitant came around once they saw Robin in action. Teresa Webb, Contractor Success Manager at Roof Connect, one of the companies CSS supports, described feeling intimidated at first.

“When IT first introduced Robin to me, I was a little hesitant, a little scared to use it, a little intimidated,” Webb said. “But once I got brave enough to try it, it was really easy and he’s user friendly and it’s really neat that he has a personality and it’s like telling you to have a good day.”

For CSS’s marketing coordinator Jacob Lankford, that reach showed up in fewer interruptions and more focus.

“I feel like I’m able to work at my own pace now. It’s less interruptions,” Lankford said. “I look to Robin to help me get to the root of the problem before I look elsewhere now.”

The results: double the ticket volume, same team, SLAs intact

Eighteen months in, the numbers tell the story CSS needed. Ticket volume has doubled, but the technician headcount hasn’t moved. Every ticket that comes into the CSS service desk now interacts with Robin before it reaches a human technician.

“I believe last month we had over 600 tickets created and all of those tickets interfaced with Robin before they came to us. I honestly don’t see a world where we’d be able to keep up with our ticket load if it weren’t for Robin doing so much of that legwork upfront for us.” said Reece Brown. 

That resolution rate keeps climbing as the team refines Robin’s context and workflows. “We were expecting only five to 10% of tickets being resolved,” Brown said. “But now we’re seeing tickets being increasingly resolved. The more that we’re enhancing Robin, the more we’re providing context, the more we’re providing workflows and resolution steps.”

For Roberts, the impact goes beyond ticket counts. It shows up in her reporting, too.

“With Atera, my reporting has really become next level,” Roberts said. “Not only am I seeing SLAs, resolution rates, all of the normal KPIs, but I can actually see time saved and time saved equals money saved.” That kind of visibility is one reason CSS’s setup lines up with what we cover in our guide to choosing the right PSA software.