The Economics of Support
Finance asked what the help desk cost. The answer was the salaries of three people and a licence, which is the answer finance already had. The real answer was in the tickets: nine hundred hours a year spent by users waiting for things. The tickets also showed forty hours a month of a technician re-entering requests that arrived by phone. They showed a procurement process that held every laptop request for eleven days. They showed a walk-up culture that cost a senior technician a third of every afternoon. None of that was on the invoice. All of it was on the desk's books, and the desk had never added it up. Adding it up looked like making a case and the desk was busy.
This series adds it up. It covers where the money actually goes, in hours, drawn as a map. It covers cost per ticket and its traps, which are mostly the ways of driving it down that make the desk worse. It covers the cost of waiting, which is the number nobody counts and the biggest one there is. Then come the cost and payback of deflection and prevention, pointing to the series that hold the arithmetic. It covers the cost of a bad tool or a bad process, priced as the expensive habit it is. And it covers presenting support economics without a spreadsheet war, in ranges and on one page. Every number here is a worked example in hours from a fictional desk. Your own are in your ticket system, unadded.
Articles in This Series
- Where the Money Actually Goes: The Cost Map of a Support Desk
People, tools, waiting, rework, the walk-up, the hidden costs; the cost map of a desk in hours; and the map to copy. - Cost per Ticket and Its Traps: A Diagnostic, Not a Target
Why cost per ticket is a diagnostic rather than a target, the three wrong ways to drive it down, and the cost-per-ticket read. - The Cost of Waiting: The Number Nobody Counts
User time lost while a ticket is open, the blocked process, the arithmetic in hours, why it dwarfs the desk's own time, and the waiting-cost worksheet. - The Cost and Payback of Deflection and Prevention
What it costs to write the article, run the sweep and build the button; the payback; and the payback sheet. - The Cost of a Bad Tool or a Bad Process, Priced in Hours
Rework, double entry, the walk-up culture, the approval that takes a week; identifying and pricing the expensive habit; and the habit cost table. - Presenting Support Economics Without a Spreadsheet War
Hours as the currency, ranges, the one page, the number you will defend, and the economics one-pager.
Explore More Topics
This series is part of the QuerySolv helpdesk topic library. It covers the foundations, processes, communication, knowledge, tooling, metrics, classic ticket domains, people and strategy behind a support desk that works. The library pairs well with the software we build: QuerySolv. It is a self-hosted help desk that runs as one Windows service on your own network. It is licensed once per installation, not per agent per month.