How the snowballing costs of your IT problems can be fixed by having a good helpdesk.

Has your help desk ever lost tickets? Missed calls? Demand for additional help desk support? How a poor performing help desk can cost you A LOT more than wasted time.

It’s Friday afternoon. Your printer is still offline—your report is due to your client by the end of the day and you find yourself scrambling to find a way to print it.  The ticket you submitted 5 days ago is still unresolved. Not even a phone call letting you know when to expect it fixed. You end up driving through rush hour traffic to a Kinko’s 20 minutes from your office just to get the report finished.

You end up frustrated, stressed and exhausted all because technology isn’t working for you.

Realize that the scene I set is really simple (and maybe not too costly—20 minutes driving and some layered on stress to get work finished on time). But what if the problem were more immediate?

Your network is down—no one can work.

Your website was hacked and is riddled with spam and viruses.

Cryptolocker just took over your network.

What you might not have realized is how much money your business is losing every time a computer problem isn’t handled immediately. Today I wanted to go through the math on how much a bad helpdesk can actually cost your business.

When you call in and either can’t get ahold of someone or can’t get your problem resolved. That downtime—whether a printer or entire network— costs money. And a good helpdesk can really make all the difference in keeping your people productive, agile and running rather than frustrated and slow from not getting simple problems fixed quickly.

Excessive cost from poor helpdesk can be seen:

• Poor staff utilization— Let’s be clear, service desk IS labor intensive—you need people at the ready to fix issues (large and small) and to support your staff. If your team is understaffed, or mis-staffed across the workday [hyperlink to helpdesk efficiency article], you’re likely burning through money one way or another.
• Unresponsive service—If you have to wait before getting your call answered or your ticket responded to—especially if an emergency—you are losing money from lost productivity and missed opportunities.
• Self-Solutions—When your staff have given up on your helpdesk (either because they haven’t gotten back to you or haven’t resolved their problems in the past), they are likely trying to resolve problems on their own before seeking help. However infrequent, self-solutions are costly to your business.
• Getting other IT Staff Involved—Users may by-pass your helpdesk for other more preferred IT staff members. Helpdesk people are supposed to get your team’s problems solved quickly or escalate the issue to the right person for the job. Having a poor helpdesk may result in high resolution costs for simple-to-fix problems.

Bottom Line: Poor help desk costs major money!

Why quality IT helpdesk makes you more productive?

• Tickets get closed quickly—first contact resolution rate improves customer satisfaction and leads to higher productivity.
• Technician job satisfaction—lower turnover, greater productivity (more tickets closed)
• Technology Knowledge—sufficient knowledge to handle a breadth of problems on the fly—you have a diverse staff and need a helpdesk team that knows how to service everyone’s problems.
• On-going Training—keeping people up-to-speed, your helpdesk needs continual education, exposure and training to handle the most current problems.

Can you afford to lose money from a poorly run helpdesk?

Contact us today for a free helpdesk assessment to find out where you’re not just hemorrhaging money, but also productivity and job satisfaction.