By Dick Stark

If you want to find more oil, you drill more wells. If you want to secure more sales leads, you make more calls.  If you want to improve customer satisfaction and lower the overall cost of service management, you….

According to Jeff Rumburg, of MetricNet, during a presentation he gave at the Washington DC local itSMF meeting last Thursday, you “pay your L1 (remote) and L2 (desk side support) technicians more money.”  At least that is one of the many findings from his 2014 benchmark study of 138 organizations in 31 countries.  (This was an exhaustive study based on detailed survey results of dozens of metrics using his defined benchmarking methodology that he has fine-tuned over the past 25 years.)

Jeff reported that the two metrics that really matter are customer satisfaction and cost. He pointed out that most organizations strive to reduce the cost of service management and at the same time, increase customer satisfaction.  While these goals are not mutually exclusive, there is a diminishing return to customer satisfaction as the cost per ticket increases.  In other words, no organization can afford zero defects. Even more interesting, there is no real benefit to having an expensive ITSM toolset (over a less expensive ITSM toolset,) especially when combined with a low level of organizational ITSM maturity.

Jeff’s 2014 benchmark study determined the average cost per ticket of a L1 call to be $22, while the cost of an L2 call is $62.  L2 costs are always higher because upon the amount of travel time required to support the end user. Level 0 support, or self-service is only $2 per call, meaning that more mature organizations strive to “move to the left,” by focusing more on self-service or remote support. Organizations running their service and support as a business with a high level of customer satisfaction on average lose 17 hours of productive time per employee per year.  This compares with less efficient organizations that lose 47 hours of time per year.  Do the math and an organization that moves “to the right” on the customer satisfaction index, saves 30 hour of productive time per year per employee.  An organization with 1000 employees and an average salary of $80,000 per year saves 30,000 hours.  This translates to an annual productivity savings of $1.15M per year.

Jeff argues that by paying L1 and L2 techs more money, turnover declines, quality of support increases, and overall costs go down.  Here are other ideas to reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction:

Move to the Left. Whether you are a business user (MyIT) or IT user (SmartIT), BMC offers solutions that offer improved collaboration and self-service. For example, MyIT allows mobile device users to submit and check trouble tickets as well as view knowledge articles. And problem solving is made easier because GPS enablement means location specific issues may be rapidly identified.

Smart Reporting.  Arguably, the best new Remedy v9 feature, Smart Reporting, like reporting in-Salesforce, enables users to build custom reports with ease. Even better, users can share, follow, and comment on graphs and charts to get the whole team engaged in making better decisions.

More Options.  In addition to Remedy, BMC offers Remedyforce and FootPrints which provide excellent value and high customer satisfaction. Both scale to support medium to large customers.