IT support has long been measured by how quickly a ticket is acknowledged, not how quickly it’s solved. However, as environments become increasingly complex and vendor landscapes expand, mere acknowledgment alone is no longer sufficient. In an era where seconds of downtime can ripple into lost revenue and damaged trust, there’s a more meaningful metric emerging: Time-to-Engineering (TTE).
TTE isn’t about how fast someone gets back to you. It’s about how fast a real engineer starts working on your problem.
For organizations dealing with high-stakes infrastructure, hybrid environments, and multi-vendor dependencies, the traditional, tiered approach to support—Level 1 to Level 2 to Level 3—is proving to be too slow, too generic, and too disconnected. It’s time to rethink what support should look like, and that starts by eliminating the layers that separate customers from the experts who can solve the problem.
The Problem with Traditional Support Models
For decades, the standard IT support model has followed a rigid, tiered structure. Tickets begin at Level 1—basic intake and scripted troubleshooting—and escalate upward only after predefined steps have been exhausted. It’s a system built for volume, not velocity.
In theory, this model is meant to create efficiency. In practice, it often creates bottlenecks. Especially in multi-vendor environments, where vendors may pass responsibility back and forth, customers often find themselves explaining the same issue multiple times to different people, none of whom are empowered to fix it directly.
Worse, most SLAs do not measure the time it takes to engage someone with the skillset to resolve the issue. Instead, they measure response time—how quickly someone says, “We’ve received your ticket.” The gap between acknowledgment and meaningful action is the heart of the problem.
“The traditional model delays resolution because it assumes a customer needs to be triaged before they deserve engineering time,” says Isaac Gamboa, VP of Engineering at Xcelocloud. “We flipped that—we start with engineers because every second matters.”
The Tipping Point: Complexity and Consolidation
According to a 2023 Censuswide survey of over 600 U.S. IT leaders, more than 70% said their vendor-by-vendor support model was no longer meeting their needs. As digital ecosystems expand, organizations are turning to managed services and third-party support providers to consolidate contracts, reduce costs, and simplify vendor management.
However, consolidation alone often fails to improve the support experience. A single point of contact doesn’t help if every issue still gets routed through a labyrinth of scripts and escalation queues.
What businesses need instead is a model that leads directly to resolution, not merely a new label applied to old inefficiencies.
Rethinking First-Tier Support
Some forward-looking managed service providers are flipping the model. Instead of routing issues through tiers, they start at the top, assigning experienced, high-level engineers as the first point of contact. This removes the artificial delays built into traditional support structures, significantly reducing TTE.
Rather than asking a customer to repeat their issue at every step, this approach connects them directly to someone capable of diagnosing and resolving the problem in real-time. No scripts. No handoffs. No vendor finger-pointing.
“When you’re supporting multi-vendor environments, escalation chains get long fast,” Gamboa notes. “We reduce risk by shortening that chain—connecting customers to senior engineers immediately, not eventually.”
Beyond SLAs: Shifting the Focus to Resolution
SLAs still have a place in IT contracts, but they are no longer sufficient as the sole measure of performance. Organizations are beginning to recognize the limitations of metrics that emphasize ticket closure rates or response times while ignoring time to resolution.
Financially backed SLAs can be helpful, but the fundamental shift occurs when service providers build their operating models around proactive engagement, rather than scripted intake. This means hiring and retaining senior engineers, investing in ongoing training, and measuring performance based on outcomes rather than just closed tickets.
What TTE Enables: Proactive Support and Engineering Mindset
The benefits of reducing TTE go beyond speed. When senior engineers engage from the start, they’re often able to spot systemic issues, configuration risks, or patterns of failure that others might miss.
Support becomes less reactive and more advisory in nature. Engineers aren’t just fixing what’s broken; they’re identifying what might break next and recommending improvements to prevent repeat issues.
“TTE is not just a number—it’s a reflection of how seriously we take resolution,” says Gamboa. “The faster you reach someone who can act, the faster you’re out of the problem and back to delivery.”
Building for Scale: What Happens When the Unexpected Hits
The 2024 CrowdStrike outage provided a clear stress test for IT support models worldwide. As global systems went down, organizations quickly discovered whether their service providers could scale, both in terms of staffing and response strategy.
Some teams were forced to wait in long queues, escalating through vendor chains that were themselves overwhelmed. Others relied on rigid escalation models that couldn’t flex to meet the moment.
In contrast, service models designed for real-time responsiveness—those with embedded engineering and partner-centric processes—were able to act swiftly and decisively. During the incident, the multi-vendor support team from Xcelocloud collaborated closely with its partners to deploy surge engineering capacity, communicate proactively, and stabilize affected environments through coordinated, white-label support. This moment underscored the importance of structure, adaptability, and trust in critical service relationships.
A modern TTE model must include more than access to great engineers. It requires a framework that can flex under pressure, including surge staffing protocols, automated workflows, integrated monitoring, and fast, transparent communication with customers throughout the lifecycle of an incident.
Monitoring, Automation, and the Role of Platforms
Real-time visibility is essential for scaling modern support models. As organizations move away from traditional, layered service structures, automation plays a more critical role—not to replace people, but to empower them.
Advanced monitoring and service automation tools enable customers to track progress, trigger intelligent escalations, and prevent duplicate requests. When implemented effectively, these systems create a “single pane of glass” that delivers both real-time updates and historical context, without distracting engineers from their work.
This kind of infrastructure fosters transparency, giving customers confidence that work is being done without unnecessary noise or complexity.
“One of the biggest things customers ask for is visibility,” says Gamboa. “They don’t want multiple tools or dashboards—they want one place where they can see everything happening in their environment.”
Time-to-Engineering as a Strategic KPI
As more organizations shift from legacy OEM support to third-party managed service models, TTE is quickly becoming one of the most critical KPIs in modern IT operations.
It’s not just about resolving incidents faster, though that’s a clear outcome. It’s about transforming the support experience into something more aligned with today’s expectations: faster, more intelligent, and more outcome focused.
TTE shifts the support conversation from “how fast did you respond?” to “how quickly did we solve the problem—and how well?”
What Comes Next
The IT leaders most focused on long-term resilience are no longer satisfied with surface-level metrics or standard escalation trees. They’re looking for partners who understand that real support begins with access to real engineers—people who can act immediately, provide strategic advice, and navigate the complexities of modern infrastructure.
Time-to-engineering may have once been an internal metric. Now, it’s a competitive advantage.
Rethinking how your organization approaches support? Let’s talk. Discover how a faster path to engineering can reduce risk, accelerate recovery, and improve every part of the support experience.
