Perhaps your IT help desk is in-house. Or, you might have outsourced all or part of your IT service desk.
Either way, one of the best big-picture ways to assess help desk performance is by calculating your Cost Per Ticket. This metric is the gold standard when it comes to determining the efficiency of your IT help desk – and the efficiency of any outsourced IT help desk vendors you may be considering.
Here are the things you must know about your Cost Per Ticket so you can make smarter business decisions.
Cost Per Ticket is an IT service desk metric that indicates the average cost of resolving a ticket. Cost Per Ticket is typically calculated on a monthly basis. When an outsourced help desk vendor quotes you their Cost Per Ticket, they are telling you their average Cost Per Ticket per month.
Speaking broadly, you calculate your Cost Per Ticket by adding up all your help desk’s operating expenses for a given time period (typically a month), and then dividing that total by the number of tickets you resolved during that same time period.
For example:
While this seems like a simple calculation on its surface, there are a few things to consider.
The last time we checked, the average Cost Per Ticket for IT help desks in North America was $22. But before you fall off your chair at this number, you must understand a few things about Cost Per Ticket.
For one thing, Cost Per Ticket is a mean average, not a median average. It simply takes all of your operating expenses and divides them by all of your resolved tickets. It takes no notice of the types of tickets you resolved, or the length of time you took to resolve them, or the number of support tiers involved. This means your Cost Per Ticket can easily be skewed by the types of tickets you create and resolve.
For example, if during the month of February, you create a disproportionate number of tickets that require Tier 3 escalation, multiple agents and multiple days to resolve, then those tickets account for a lopsided amount of your operating expenses and make your Cost Per Ticket much higher in February than it is in other months.
Also, Cost Per Ticket is an average spread across all your tiers of support. Tier 1 tickets are typically less expensive to resolve than Tier 3 tickets because they are less complicated and require fewer resources. But your average Cost Per Ticket doesn’t reflect this unless you break it down, calculating your Cost Per Ticket for each support tier.
Your average Cost Per Ticket is only accurate if you include all your operating costs. You may think your current average Cost Per Ticket is low, but that might be because you are not measuring all the expenses you incur while operating your help desk.
To get an accurate average Cost Per Ticket, measure all your service desk operating expenses. These include items large and small, such as:
* Support employees include everyone from supervisors to trainers, from QA auditors to schedulers, from team leads to security staff.
Now, do the calculation again. If it’s much higher than $22 on a consistent basis (again, it’s important not to look at just one month’s worth of data here), that may mean you have some room for improvement.
The quickest way to lower your Cost Per Ticket is to empower your Tier 1 support agents to resolve as many ticket types as possible.
After all, the more tiers you involve in resolving a ticket, the more you must spend. So, ensure that your folks in Tier 1 have the tools and training they need to resolve tickets during that vital first call.
Another way to lower your Cost Per Ticket is to deploy a variety of self-service options that helps your users resolve minor IT issues themselves. These resources include knowledge bases, AI-powered chatbots and messaging, FAQ pages, community forums, and mobile apps.
A third way to reduce your Cost Per Ticket is to outsource all or part of your IT service desk. An outsourced help desk vendor like Global Help Desk Services, Inc. lowers your Cost Per Ticket by increasing your Tier 1 resolution rates, reducing the time it takes to resolve tickets, making your ticket-escalation system smarter, and lowering your infrastructure costs and operating expenses.
Outsourcing all (or part) of your help desk function to a third party is a big step. To ensure success, you need to have the right data on hand, conduct your due diligence and know exactly what you are looking for in a vendor.
Cost Per Ticket is a vital metric. Paired with customer satisfaction, it gives you a measurable indication of how well your IT help desk is performing. It is also a great way to measure outsourced help desk providers. Just make sure you know your numbers, you do your due diligence, and you know what you are looking for in a help desk partner.
By the way, Cost Per Ticket is simply one way to measure your return on investment. There are plenty of other ways. Discover them in our free guide: Measuring Your Real Help Desk ROI: 4 Steps to a Better Analysis.