As A Service Desk Manager, How Would You Recommend Ways To Get Additional Resources From Management?

Managing IT budgets is a juggling act. Proceed the best workers that you take on the task at all times and you volition have no bug. Merely the cost of keeping a group of highly specialized agents is significant. To reduce spending on service desks without leaving an organization unable to service requests of terminate-users is a difficult ask—and a difficult task.

Working out the cost of the boilerplate ticket is fundamental to understanding the costs to your business organisation on a range of metrics. This is where the use of information is necessary. You could bring that cost down looking at how your It service desk-bound works with users while still ensuring that your users (whether customers or employees) can get back to productivity rapidly.

When your service desk can focus on the of import stuff, the cost of the average incident will get downward. Then, it's a domino effect: A solution or service becomes more than price-effective, and management has an easier chore justifying the value of your service desk agents.

(This commodity is function of our Information technology Price Management Guide . Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

The importance of a service desk

An IT service desk-bound (or help desk) is for attending to the IT needs of the end-users in an organization. When you give every user the proper support they need, they tin go dorsum in working order without a loss of productivity.

Whether the service desk is working in-house or as an outside bureau, service desk-bound agents must provide value to any user who needs help. This involves quickly dealing with a range of IT bug, hardware or software, in-office or remote. The specialist knowledge of an IT service desk allows the requests of end-users to be dealt with in good time.

(Does your service desk accept a mission & vision statement ?)

The service desk-bound mostly provides back up to employees in a number of ways:

• A phone call to help provide simple solutions through voice support
• Ticket support submitted to the It service desk-bound
• In-person support
• Remote support either through an system's intranet or over the internet

Much of what the service desk does is related to network issues, including:

• Resetting passwords
• Connecting to networks
• Allowing access to new network areas or software
• Other general troubleshooting tasks

While some of these issues need a trained agent, software can handle others.

Is a service desk worth the toll?

Although the costs of an IT service desk are pregnant, most companies empathize that it is a necessary resource. Many organizations are looking to outsource their IT teams to keep costs down. An enterprise may prefer to get outside specialist help when needed to ensure the efficiency of resources and to manage costs.

Having a number of Information technology specialists on hand allows a visitor to:

• Cater to the needs of their customer base
• Ameliorate customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Support internal employees in 24-hour interval-to-twenty-four hour period work

Although the constraints on budgets may be a huge challenge for some, the benefits of dedicated staff volition help notice a resolution to the difficulties that a user would frequently face. This allows management to analyze the data that shows a large team tin better support the needs of every employee.

What is the Average Cost Per Ticket?

Working out the cost per ticket and and so identifying ways to reduce that cost is a headache for many IT managers. The time between receiving tickets and resolving them to the satisfaction of the individual is the almost important factor to consider—merely exactly how much should we look it to cost?

Take a look at some of the statistics around service desks:

• The boilerplate ticket cost per ticket is $fifteen.56, with lows of $2.93 and highs of $46.69.
• The boilerplate price per infinitesimal of a ticket is $1.60 (MetricNet)
• 5% of the boilerplate service desk-bound's budget is spent on staffing costs (MetricNet)
• A vast majority of back up desks (91%) plan to include cocky-servicing options in the future (SDI)

(Explore more service desk benchmarks .)

Maximizing service desk-bound value

There are several strategies you tin can look at to maximize the value of your service desk-bound, without running up the budget.

Hire more than service desk agents

Utilise more staff, lookout the tickets be resolved quicker. As the average internal support service desk receives on average 492 tickets per calendar month and a staggering 69% of internal back up tickets are resolved in i bear on. This data shows that a trained agent can deal with issues and provide a solution quickly.

Hiring more staff and spreading the number of tickets makes the process simpler. Taking the book of tickets per Information technology service desk specialist downward allows for a quick response time in any enterprise. This cuts downward on the time betwixt receiving a ticket and the issue's resolution, which leads to greater customer satisfaction.

Automate repetitive tasks

Doing away with repetitive tasks is the easiest fashion to improve your business' efficiency. Free up your employees to deal with the difficult stuff and yous will go the most out of them. This includes giving customers access to quality resource.

(Deploy service/help desk-bound automation & explore all-time tools .)

Self-service options

A self-service plan allows end-users to log into a portal and find solutions to their issues without needing to call or submit a ticket. Of class, this is no replacement for a dedicated service desk pb by IT professionals. Sometimes, some issues are too difficult to handle without specialist support.

Still, a self-service portal is an fantabulous way to raise customer satisfaction. An end-user tin can find solutions to simple problems, such as password resets, without having to escalate the problem.

Reducing the cost of the service desk-bound

For the stressed It manager, cost reduction tin can come in many forms. Reducing the cost per ticket can help deal with congested budgets and making certain that every stop-user gets the appropriate service they need.

It tin can be difficult to manage resources, but at that place are many easy fixes that you tin implement. And so, each incident becomes an easily solved problem by a trained agent and productivity tin pick upward again. But the focus needs to exist on how to do this effectively.

Ask yourself, and your team, these questions to help determine a better way to handle service desk touches.

Tin can self-service and chatbots help?

Adopting self-service software is an easy manner to deal with repetitive tasks such equally countersign resets and basic functionality errors. These self-service programs tin can deed equally a knowledge base that a puzzled employee could search. (Here'due south where a robust knowledge direction arrangement thrives.)

Introducing this technology to your business can then free up staff to focus on tasks that cannot exist handled without the support of a specialist. Implementing an effective self-service platform can hands lower the number of tickets.

Another splendid way to do this is by implementing a chatbot. This will allow users to find their own solutions through the utilise of AI, non just relying on a knowledge base to guide them.

Tin can we reduce ticket treatment fourth dimension?

Although it can exist hard to reduce the amount of time, the value of every service desk employee rises when they tin deal with bug quickly. Efficiency leads to great savings. That'due south why first contact resolution (FCR) is a critical service/assistance desk metric.

To reduce ticket handling fourth dimension, commencement analyze and and then streamline—including the very way that you fix issues or handle requests. Consider these strategies:

• Employing highly trained and capable individuals.
• Ensuring that the organization continues to develop all private agents throughout their career. (Stagnation is fatal to productivity.)
• Using engineering science to handle a pregnant proportion of easily solved tasks.

These factors volition bring down the average time that a service desk volition have to bargain with an issue thanks to experience, expertise, and better skills in dealing with a given cease-user. In a way, employing more specialists tin can actually reduce the overall service desk cost.

How minor tin can a team be?

Reducing the staff often is an attractive option for management—cutting salaries, cut costs. Simply the truth is that a smaller IT team leads to a worse user experience.

The recommended number of service desk specialists is 1 service desk employee to every seventy workers in a company. When the ratio is lower than this, incidents are dealt with more slowly and customer satisfaction drops. The cost for this is inestimable but can be pregnant, fifty-fifty more than than spending to continue teams at an appropriate size.

Moreover, the average downtime of an employee that requires IT back up causes a large cost to business organisation processes. If an employee can't piece of work for a full mean solar day because of a computer issue that takes a long fourth dimension to resolve, that is another cost yous won't recoup.

As the cost per ticket goes up, so does the disruption that is caused to a business organization.

Can we consolidate the service desk?

Some companies run multiple service desks, non a single one that services the entire employee or customer base of operations. They might do this considering of geography, service portfolios, and skillsets of agents and who they're servicing.

If you're in this state of affairs, look at the obstacles to consolidating the service desk-bound. Several strategies can piece of work together to consolidate the service desk effort, like:

• Creating a strategic vision
• Enlist volunteers who support this motility
• Institute modify

Tin can we be proactive?

For some issues, the all-time approach is existence proactive. Railroad train your non-It specialists, then give them tools to treat their problems on their own. This can exist done through the apply of a well-developed knowledge base, simply the endeavor cannot stop there.

By delivering quality grooming to your non-Information technology specialists, you can reduce the cost per ticket by removing some tickets altogether. The costs of training your employees over the course of a yr have direct implications on the price of maintaining an It team which but deals with password resets.

Reducing service desk-bound cost isn't like shooting fish in a barrel

Reducing costs is never easy. Getting a specialist group of professionals to reduce the price per ticket is not piece of cake either. But effective management can atomic number 82 to the jobs an It specialist employee has to deal with (resetting a password or replacing hardware) being reduced in book.

Setting upwards your working environment with intelligent, cutting-edge back up solutions can make operations smoother, reduce spending, and improve the value your staff bring. This means introducing an constructive organisation that can automate the elementary stuff and gratuitous upward staff to set up the bigger bug.

BMC supports the service desk-bound

BMC Helix ITSM is industry-leading service direction that uses intelligent automation to transform best-practice ITSM principles into the modern agile service solutions businesses need.

In fact, BMC Helix ITSM can help y'all realize 354% ROI and meliorate service desk efficiency up to 45%.

(Learn more about BMC Helix ITSM .)

Related reading

• BMC Service Direction Blog
• Service Request Management in ITIL^® iv, function of our ITIL 4 Guide
• v Metrics & KPIs All Service Desks Need
• Pitfalls of Choosing the Wrong Information technology Service Desk-bound Metrics
• Agile ITSM: How Agile & Service Direction Tin can Work Together
• CapEx vs OpEx: Capital Expenditures & Operating Expenses Explained

These postings are my own and do non necessarily correspond BMC'due south position, strategies, or opinion.

See an error or accept a suggestion? Delight let us know by emailing blogs@bmc.com.

Source: https://www.bmc.com/blogs/service-desk-cost-reduction/

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