Why Your Tickets Keep Bouncing

If you’ve been in this industry long enough, you’ve seen the same loop play out over and over. A ticket gets touched three, four, five times, and somehow nobody actually owns it. Everyone adds a comment, nobody makes a decision. The client is annoyed. Your team is annoyed. And you’re wondering why the queue feels like quicksand.

Let’s be honest about what’s really happening.

1. Your dispatch process is doing more harm than good

Most MSPs don’t have a real dispatch process, they have a vague hope that “the team knows what to do.”

That works when you’re five people. It collapses when you’re ten. At thirty people, it’s enough to make you want to finally pick up that cabin in the woods.

Bad dispatch creates:

• Tickets missing key details

• Zero priority logic

• Work assigned to whoever clicks first

• Constant re-routing because the first assignment was wrong

The team isn’t confused, they’re reacting to chaos upstream.

2. Nobody is defining “done” the same way

Ask three technicians what “resolved” means. You’ll get four answers.

Bounce happens because:

• The tech thinks it’s done

• The client disagrees

• The next tech reopens it

• The first tech gets irritated

• The client gets whiplash

You fix this with a single definition of done, tied to a checklist that lives inside the workflow. Not in a PDF nobody reads.

3. Your service board isn’t designed, it’s inherited

Most MSPs are using ticket statuses and workflows that were built by someone who left the company three years ago.

The result:

• Too many statuses

• No clear escalation path

• Stalled tickets hiding in “Pending Client” purgatory

• Techs guessing where things go

A messy board guarantees bounce. A clean board reduces it by half, sometimes more.

4. Your team is making the right decision, but at the wrong time

Half of “bad behavior” in a ticket queue is actually good intention applied at the wrong moment.

Examples:

• A tech pulls a ticket that looks easy, but it requires approvals

• Someone tries to troubleshoot before checking notes

• A ticket gets escalated because the tech wasn’t trained on a product they absolutely should be trained on

These aren’t talent problems. They’re sequencing problems. You solve them with explicit swim lanes, guardrails, and short feedback loops.

5. The root cause nobody likes to admit: misaligned expectations

Most ticket bounce is really expectation bounce.

The client expects one thing, the tech expects another, the system supports neither.
It’s not incompetence.
It’s misalignment.

If you don’t set expectations at dispatch, the rest of the process is already in the ditch.

How to fix this fast

Here’s the shortest path to impact:

• Design dispatch

• Eliminate dead statuses

• Write a real definition of done

• Train one lead tech on what “ownership” actually means

• Review the queue daily for two weeks

That’s enough to reduce bounce by 30 to 50 percent in most MSPs. It’s not complicated. It’s just work most teams never get around to.