According to a survey, less than 5% of all Information Technology spending is allocated to end-user support. Interestingly, support drives customer satisfaction for ALL of Information Technology. According to MetricNet, 84% people surveyed believe that Service Desk is most important for customer satisfaction!
Isn’t it strange? The above details that I’ve talked are about IT; however, I am sure that they could be in similar range for any support as well. The average cost of resolution per ticket for North America comes to about USD 22 for Level 1 Service Desk while it shoots up significantly to USD 471 if it is outsourced to a vendor to provide support! Indeed there are different metrics like agent utilization, average speed of answer, net first contact resolution rate etc that need to be considered as well.
As I have shared my thoughts in previous blogs, the maturity about Helpdesk or ITSM still seems to be low at customer end and we have observed that very few customers are ITSM-literate and know how to define the requirements towards it properly. Most of customers start stating that they would need basic features of Helpdesk to keep the costs low; not understanding long term aspects of how critical a Helpdesk is, or, not focusing on how issues/problems that are specific to their organization can be resolved by getting Helpdesk implemented properly. They tend to ignore a fact that Helpdesk is a medium between them (service/support provider) and the customers and they better ensure that they do a good job in having the best and optimal solution implemented.
Essentially, implementing a Helpdesk or ITSM is just setting up your first step towards right direction of enhancing productivity and cutting down costs. The further steps of customizing the solutions/features as per business requirements, ensuring best practices, deriving meaningful reports, analytics, providing historical details, impact analysis, projections etc form a core part of an effective and efficient Helpdesk/ITSM system. Sadly, seldom organizations look into these aspects and most of the ‘so called leaders’ seem to be interested only in boasting of how they could get Helpdesk implemented with the least cost, not realizing the long term implications or what critical data they would be missing. It is ironical that they seem to spend least on a system that would give them real time data and information to enhance and have greater customer satisfactions. Do you think if you were on the verge of making similar mistakes and/or have already done it? Do you need any help to get that sorted? You know how to reach out to us in that case
You’re on top of the game. Thanks for sharnig.
Thank you, Shanna 🙂