The bleak economy is causing most enterprises to cut costs even while maintaining – or growing – their business. For nearly every user out there, though, sacrificing the use of the BlackBerry is out of the question. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t costs to be cut.
Earlier this week, BoxTone and The 451 Group hosted a webinar entitled “5 Steps for Cutting BlackBerry Support Costs (While Improving Service) in 2009.” We were joined by Chris Hazelton, research director for The 451 Group, and talked about how IT staffs are being asked to do more with less and how to streamline costs with BlackBerry deployments.
The interest in this topic was impressive. We had more than 200 attendees -- mostly senior BES admins and messaging managers at mid-sized and large enterprises plus government agencies. In an interactive poll of the group, as shown in the chart below, about 95% indicated that their organization’s smartphones were a "necessity for doing business." Well more than half indicated that they are continuing or accelerating deployment of smartphones, while about 38% of attendees said the economy is slowing their rate of deployment. This reinforces that refrain IT admins hear from their users: “you’ll have to pry my BlackBerry out of my cold dead hands.” So clearly the trend is to find ways to reduce overall mobility costs without cutting out devices or losing productivity.
We have all seen and lived the fact that when any organization adopts a new technology strategically, the goal is to achieve economies of scale over the long term (without impacting service quality). In our experience working with hundreds of customers, there are actually costs that can be taken out right away and more over the long term. Since many of these costs are hidden and savings are left unrealized, we hosted this webinar to share a five-step process we’ve seen our customers use to recover immediate and long-term savings:
1. Understand Your Mobile Cost Factors – The cost of deploying and supporting a BlackBerry isn’t limited to the price of the device and the monthly service fee. The equation is more complex: you also need to factor in the labor costs of the help desk, IT operations, and training/support, as well as the cost of the BES, SQL, T-Support and maintenance and support for all dependent software. If you understand the formula for tracking and reducing your costs, you’re on your way to realizing savings. In the webinar we discuss industry benchmarks and a specific formula for attacking each element of these costs.
2. Track Utilization & Take Action – We have found that in a typical organization, anywhere between 3% and 8% of mobile users do not actually use their smartphone or don't get the productivity that’s expected. Ipsos-Reid and Gartner Research data shows that average TCO per smarphone per year is $1,100 to $2,200 while average productivity gain is $14,000. This means that, for example, in a 2,000-user organization, eliminating those underutilized smartphones could save up to $248,000 in the first year alone ($1550 average x 2000 users x 0.08). We’ve learned that the best practice is to identify ways to systematically track key utilization metrics, such as incomplete activations, data volumes, and the last time users sent, received or read messages and use that data to take action.
3. Track & Reduce Mean-Time-To Repair (MTTR) – Industry studies and surveys show that it can take between 30 and 120 minutes to resolve a mobile user’s problem. Gartner Research estimates that the average smartphone user calls the help desk four to six times each year. That can be an expensive problem, considering that the Help Desk Institute, for example, calculates that for PC Laptop support, Level 1 help desk calls can cost $25-50 per incident, while costs skyrocket to $100 for Level 2 and $275 for Level 3. (There is no smartphone data so we are using laptop support costs as a proxy.) To avoid these expenses, we've learned that best practice is to systematically track trouble tickets and MTTR, and collaborate across operations, messaging and the help desk with automation tools to ensure users’ issues are resolved quickly.
4. Optimize Performance to Eliminate Incidents – Most organizations are unaware of their top key performance metric: Average Delivery Time. While the best-in-class average delivery time is less than 2 minutes, some users often experience significant performance delays. We've learned that best practice is to focus on eliminating chronic problems, such as by limiting the BES-Mail Server ratio to 1:7, limiting mailbox sizes to less than 1GB, or spreading high-volume users across multiple BES and static messaging agents.
For example, one Top 100 law firm had a real problem with user satisfaction because average message delivery time was greater than 12 minutes. By focusing on improving delivery performance by eliminating problem areas, they were able to achieve delivery time of less than 2 minutes, which reduced calls to the help desk and saved the firm money over the long term.
5. Push Down Support to Lower Cost Resources – Industry studies and surveys show that less than 35% of all mobile user issues are resolved by the front-line help desk. The best-in-class industry benchmark is 70%. To reduce user frustration and improve issue resolution, we've learned that the best practice is to migrate the support load to the help desk through automation tools and training. And to save even more, deploy user self-service capabilities.
For example, a large media/entertainment conglomerate had more than 300 help desk calls per month that required Level 2 or above assistance, costing $30,000 a month. By training providing training and tools for their help desk, they reduced those escalated calls by half saving the company more than $15,000 each month.
Working with our customers and partners, we've found a consistent pattern of succecss with these initiatives. We’ve seen the 5 Step plan in action and know it works. If you want to learn more about how you can cut costs without eliminating the BlackBerry smartphones that your users depend on, check out the replay of our webinar. Click here to run the 60-minute On-Demand Replay and get all the details on the 5 Steps!
By Brians2