What is Dispatch HQ?
Dispatch HQ is a structured service delivery platform built for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). It sits at the critical middle stage of your service delivery workflow, picking up where a ticket is created and carrying it through triage and dispatching before it ever reaches scheduling or resolution.
Think of it as the command center for your service delivery operations. Where traditional workflows rely on human dispatchers to manually review, categorize, prioritize, and assign tickets, Dispatch HQ uses AI to automate and standardize those steps, keeping your service desk moving efficiently no matter what the day throws at you.
The Components of Dispatch HQ
Dispatch HQ is built around two distinct experiences: one for dispatchers and one for technicians. Together, they cover the full lifecycle of a ticket from the moment it arrives to the moment a tech begins working it.
Dispatchers work across four tabs:
Calendar — Where dispatchers view and manage their team's appointments alongside their ticket queue.
Triage — Where new, unreviewed tickets land and get classified before entering the dispatch queue.
Unassigned — Where triaged tickets are ranked by priority and made ready for technicians to pull.
Assigned — Where dispatchers monitor team workload and rebalance tickets for specific technicians.
Technicians have their own focused view that shows only their own work, organized into what needs attention now, what is ready to work, and what is on hold. When they are ready for something new, they use the Pull Ticket feature to request their next assignment.
What's in This Guide
This Help Center series covers everything you need to get started with and get the most out of Dispatch HQ. Use the links below to jump to any article:
Dispatch HQ: Overview — What Dispatch HQ is, the problems it solves, and how it fits into your workflow. (You are here)
Setting Up Dispatch HQ — How to enable Dispatch HQ and configure your service boards and statuses.
The Calendar Tab — A dispatcher's guide to viewing and managing your team's appointments.
The Triage Tab — A dispatcher's guide to reviewing and classifying incoming tickets.
The Unassigned Tab — A dispatcher's guide to prioritizing and routing tickets to your team.
The Assigned Tab — A dispatcher's guide to monitoring workload and managing your team's tickets.
The Tech View — A technician's guide to managing daily work in Dispatch HQ.
The Problem It Solves
MSP service desks face a set of recurring, interconnected challenges that are hard to solve with people alone.
Dispatcher coverage gaps are one of the most disruptive. When your dispatcher calls out sick, takes a day off, or leaves the company, someone else has to step in, often a technician or service manager who now has to context-switch out of their normal role. That replacement typically isn't as efficient or consistent, and tickets can pile up fast. Even a single missed day can throw off SLA timelines for your clients.
Inconsistent triage compounds the problem. Many MSPs have a triage process on paper, but in practice the quality of that triage varies depending on who is doing it. One dispatcher may handle it one way, and the person filling in handles it differently. That inconsistency creates downstream problems when tickets need to be prioritized or matched to the right technician.
Ticket cherry picking is a separate but equally common issue. In MSPs where technicians self-assign (pull) tickets from a shared service board, it is human nature to gravitate toward the easiest or most familiar tickets. That leaves harder, higher-priority, or SLA-sensitive tickets sitting unworked. The techs who are willing to take everything get overloaded, and the ones who avoid complexity skew the team's workload distribution.
Together, these three problems create bottlenecks, SLA risk, dispatcher burnout, and inconsistent service delivery.
How Dispatch HQ Addresses These Problems
Dispatch HQ introduces structure, consistency, and intelligence to the three core stages of your service delivery flow: triage, dispatching, and ticket pulling.
Standardized AI-Assisted Triage — When a ticket comes in, Dispatch HQ uses AI to automatically review it and suggest or apply the correct settings like Type, Subtype, Item, as well as Priority classification. This removes the dependency on a single dispatcher's knowledge or availability. Whether it is a Monday morning or a day your dispatcher is out, triage happens the same way, every time.
Intelligent Dispatching — Rather than requiring a human to scan through an unassigned queue and decide who should get which ticket, Dispatch HQ surfaces the right suggestions based on technician skill set, availability, and workload. The system reduces the manual overhead of dispatching while helping ensure the right ticket gets to the right person.
Guided Ticket Pulling — For MSPs that use a pull model where technicians self-assign work, Dispatch HQ removes the ability to cherry pick. When a tech is ready for their next ticket, the system recommends the most appropriate one for them based on skill fit and priority. They do not browse the queue and pick the easiest option. They request a ticket and the system serves up the right one, protecting SLAs and leveling out workload distribution across the team.
Where Dispatch HQ Fits in Your Workflow
Dispatch HQ is designed to complement TimeZest's existing scheduling capabilities, not replace any part of your existing PSA or ticketing system. It covers the middle stage of the service delivery lifecycle: from the moment a ticket is created through the point it is ready to be worked or scheduled. TimeZest handles scheduling. Dispatch HQ handles everything that needs to happen before scheduling begins.
Who Benefits Most
Dispatch HQ is built for MSPs that are experiencing growing pains with their service desk operations, particularly those dealing with dispatcher burnout or turnover, inconsistent ticket data quality, SLA misses caused by poor prioritization, or technician teams that self-assign from a shared queue.
If your service delivery relies heavily on one or two people knowing how everything works, Dispatch HQ gives you a way to encode that knowledge into a system so your operation is more resilient, consistent, and scalable.