Would you rather lose 17 hours or 46 hours of productivity per employee this year due to the quality of your IT support?
Only given these two choices, you would choose 17 hours, but your reality may be a lot different.
MetricNet, an organization that focuses almost exclusively on such things, research shows that the companies in the first quartile, with the highest performing IT support desks, lose about 18 hours, or about $360.00 in payroll* per employee, per year in productive time. For this conversation, we will take revenue and profit out of the equation.
Source: MetricNet.com, Presentation: Unleashing the Enormous Power of Desktop Support KPI’s
Companies with IT support desks performing in the top 25%; with 1000 employees as an example lose $360,000/yr. in salary to lost productivity driven by IT support. At the other end of the spectrum, the bottom 25% lose approximately 46 hours of employee productive time per year, at a cost of $966,000* again for a 1000 employee company.
How many productive working hours per year do your employees lose to IT support issues?
Impact on IT Support
While employees are not being productive, IT has some issues of its own. Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) moves significantly between first quartile performers at reaching resolve in 40 minutes per issue vs. 5 hours for the bottom quartile. This tells me that the bottom quartile companies are experiencing issues managing the help desk and completing new projects because of the time per ticket they are spending. Customer service scores support that assumption showing a 23% slide in Customer Satisfaction between top quartile and bottom quartile IT support organizations.
What does your Competitors IT Support look like?
It is one thing to accept the fact that your own IT support organization is costing you money. After all, they are your warts, and you should know the circumstances behind your performance, but what about your competitors?
Ignoring revenue and profit numbers, are you comfortable with the fact that a similar sized competitor may have already figured this out, fixed it, and getting almost one full week of productive hours out of their employees than you are? How many years of that would it take to change the competitive landscape?
How IT Support can Impact End User Productivity and the End User Experience
Of course, the best way to know exactly where you are is to establish metrics and begin measuring.
End users are the revenue generating engine or at least the revenue processing engine for your company. There is no ROI, no payback, and no return if end users cannot leverage company technology purchases to be more productive.
We are fans of measuring the end user experience, that is how we gauge the quality of our support desk and IT support services as a whole. We use tools that measure the end user experience from the edge device, but you can start by simply sitting with your end users, particularly the ones that turn in the most support issues so you can see the quality of IT support you are providing from their perspective.
Each call that comes into the IT support desk means that a customer, an end user, is working at less than optimal productivity. Mission one should be to get that end user back to maximum productivity as soon as possible.
IT support is like a racing team pit crew, your job is to correct issues as fast as possible and get your employees back in the race. You can’t win if you are stuck in the pits.
*According to the U.S. Dept. of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis report, released March 2013, the average salary in the US is $42,600, or about $21 an hour before benefits. Meaning, on average, the top 25% of all companies lose about $380 per year, per employee while the bottom 25% will lose $966 per employee.