It’s 7am on a Friday at our Tottenham Court Road office. The tea is on, the service desk has three engineers on early shift, and by the time most of our customers open for breakfast service, we’ve already handled our first 15 tickets. Here’s what a normal day looks like.
I write this kind of post occasionally because prospective customers ask me, in one form or another, the same question: “what is it actually like to work with you day to day?” The honest answer is hard to put on a brochure. So instead, here’s a Friday - a real shape of one, anyway, with the names changed and a couple of details blurred - from the inside of our service desk in Fitzrovia.
7:00 to 9:00 - Breakfast service and the early ticket flow
The early shift starts at 6:45. By 7am the kettle has been on twice and the three engineers on the rota have already triaged the overnight queue and started picking up live tickets. This is the busiest window of the morning for hotel customers in particular, because breakfast service runs from around half past six and any technology that didn’t quite recover from an overnight reboot makes itself known fast.
A typical first hour: a four-star hotel near Marble Arch has a printer offline at the breakfast pass - we push the queue, restart the print spooler remotely, and it’s back inside three minutes. A boutique hotel in Bloomsbury reports guest WiFi dropping on the top floor; we can see from our monitoring that one of their access points has gone unresponsive overnight, and an engineer schedules a swap-out for late morning when the guest rooms are empty. A restaurant group’s PMS isn’t pushing room charges through to their EPOS - a known integration hiccup that needs a service restart on the middleware. Forty seconds of work.
By 9am the early-morning queue is clear. Fifteen tickets resolved or in flight, none of them headline-grabbing, all of them the kind of thing that would have ruined a manager’s morning if they’d had to call a generalist MSP and explain it from scratch.
9:00 to 11:00 - The office crowd wakes up
Once breakfast tails off, the rhythm changes. Restaurant group head offices come online. This is when the “business as usual” tickets land - the things that have nothing to do with a kitchen but everything to do with running a hospitality operation properly.
Today’s example: a six-site casual dining group has a new starter joining their finance team on Monday. We’ve had the request sitting in the queue since Wednesday because that’s how we like it - twenty-four hours minimum lead time so nothing gets rushed. By 9:30 the new starter’s Microsoft 365 account is provisioned, licensed, in the right groups, with Teams configured and a laptop being imaged in our office for courier collection that afternoon. The hiring manager gets a one-line email confirming everything is ready. They don’t have to chase, they don’t have to log a ticket on Monday morning, and the new starter sits down on day one to a working machine.
While that’s happening, an account manager fields a call from a small cafe group planning their fourth site. They want a rough costing for the IT fit-out and an idea of lead times for the broadband install. We’ll have a draft proposal back to them within forty-eight hours. None of this hits the service desk numbers, but it’s the kind of work that turns a one-site customer into a five-site customer over a couple of years.
11:00 to 13:00 - Proactive monitoring earns its keep
Mid-morning, our monitoring stack flags a UPS at a customer site running on battery. The mains power hasn’t dropped - the unit itself is failing. Nobody at the customer has noticed because nothing visible has gone wrong yet, but if we do nothing the UPS will eventually give up entirely and the next power blip will take their till estate down mid-service.
The site is in Covent Garden. The engineer on the field rota grabs a replacement from our stock cupboard and walks. By the time he’s back at his desk after lunch, the UPS is swapped, the old one is on the bench for diagnostics, and the customer has a short note in their inbox explaining what happened. They didn’t have to call us. They didn’t even know there was a problem. This is the bit that’s hardest to describe to a prospect - the absence of a crisis is invisible, by definition - but it’s the bit that, twelve months in, makes operators say “I don’t know what you’re doing but my Friday nights have stopped being terrifying.”
13:00 to 15:00 - A phishing attempt in Fitzrovia
Just after lunch, the security side of the desk picks up an alert. A finance admin at a Fitzrovia restaurant has been targeted by a fairly convincing phishing email impersonating their accountant. The email asked her to “re-authenticate” via a link that pointed to a credential-harvesting page.
She clicked. She entered her password. And then our MFA policy stopped the login dead, because the attacker couldn’t satisfy the second factor from an unfamiliar device. She mentioned it to the GM, who flagged it to us. We could see the failed sign-in attempts in the logs, confirmed nothing had been compromised, forced a password reset on her account, reviewed her mailbox rules to make sure the attacker hadn’t planted anything sneaky, and wrote up a short note for the customer’s leadership.
We also added the sender domain to a blocklist and ran a quick check across other customer tenants to see if the same campaign had hit anyone else. It hadn’t - yet - but we’d be ready if it did. The whole closed loop took about an hour and a half. The customer’s finance admin learned something useful, the customer’s directors learned that their security spend is doing what it’s meant to do, and we learned about a new domain to watch.
15:00 to 17:00 - The dinner shift starts to ramp
By mid-afternoon the rhythm shifts again. Restaurants are prepping for evening service, and that’s when the till-shaped problems start to surface. Most of these are small. A receipt printer that needs a driver nudge. A payment terminal whose software update didn’t quite settle and needs a reboot. A KDS screen that’s lost its pairing with the till after a router change earlier in the week.
One ticket today is more interesting. A multi-site operator’s Zonal estate has stopped pushing room charges through to a particular hotel’s PMS - a genuine integration failure between the two systems, not just a hung service. The engineer who picks it up has worked on this customer for over a year, knows exactly how the integration is wired, and gets to root cause in about twenty minutes. A configuration change made by the PMS vendor overnight has changed an API endpoint, and we need to update the connection string at our end and restart the service. Forty minutes from ticket open to ticket closed, customer notified, a note added to the runbook so the next engineer who sees this ticket finds the fix waiting for them.
17:00 to 20:00 - Full service desk into dinner
Five o’clock is when we go to full service desk strength. Everyone who’s working that day is on the phones, on tickets, or covering field. The early shift starts to wind down and the late shift is fully spun up by half past five. Tickets in this window are mostly WiFi, payments, and small EPOS issues - the small stuff that makes the difference between a smooth service and a manager standing at the pass swearing at a printer.
The senior engineer on shift today is handling three tickets in parallel for most of the evening: a card terminal in Marylebone that won’t connect to its acquirer, a guest WiFi captive portal misbehaving at a Soho hotel, and a kitchen printer in Borough that’s on its last legs and needs replacing in the morning. None of these tickets sit in the queue. They’re all picked up within two rings of the call landing.
20:00 to 23:00 - Reduced team, escalation ready
After 8pm we drop to a smaller team with on-call escalation behind them. The volume is lower but the stakes are higher, because a problem at 9pm on a Friday is a problem in the middle of someone’s busiest hour of the week.
Tonight’s notable incident: a bar in Soho loses its primary broadband entirely. The 4G failover on their router kicks in automatically - they barely notice a hiccup on the card terminals, and the till estate doesn’t drop a single transaction. We see the failover in our monitoring within seconds. The on-shift engineer rings the GM anyway, not because anything is broken but because we’d rather she heard from us than wonder why her connection icon looks slightly different. We’ve already opened a fault with the line provider. The repair is scheduled for first thing in the morning. She thanks us, finishes her shift, goes home.
23:00 to 07:00 - Overnight monitoring
Overnight we’re on monitoring with on-call cover for critical incidents. Most nights nothing of note happens. Occasionally something does. Tonight, at 3:14am, an EPOS server at a 24-hour venue in the West End decides to throw a wobbler and refuses to accept new transactions. The on-call engineer is paged, dials in from home, restarts the affected service, confirms transactions are flowing again, and is back asleep within twenty minutes. The site doesn’t lose a cover.
That’s the shape of it. Roughly 90 to 110 tickets in a normal Friday, depending on the weather and the football fixtures, handled by a team that knows the customers by name and the estates by heart.
What this looks like from the outside
If you’re reading this as a prospective customer, what I want you to take away is this. Predictable coverage, around the clock, from a team that recognises your sites the moment a call lands. People who know your estate well enough to fix things before you’ve finished describing them. Proactive resolution that means a chunk of the problems you’d otherwise hit never reach you in the first place. And a service desk that treats Friday night as the most important night of the week, not an inconvenience.
The numbers we publish on our stats block back this up - 98% customer satisfaction across closed tickets, average call pickup under 15 seconds, the rest of the figures are on our about page - but the reason I wrote this post is that the numbers only make sense once you’ve seen the day they describe. We’ve been doing this for hospitality operators across central London for years now, and most of our customers are within walking distance of our office in Fitzrovia.
If any of this resonates with how you’d like your IT to work, have a look at our hospitality IT support page or drop us a line. We’d be happy to walk you through what a transition looks like, with no pressure and no jargon.