Do you know how much each BlackBerry-related trouble ticket is costing your organization? If you don’t, then the answer might be “more than you can imagine.”

BoxTone for HelpDesk BlackBerry Support

Last week BoxTone hosted a webinar – How Your Help Desk Can Slash BlackBerry Escalations by 80 Percent Instantly – in which our experts showed the hundreds of attendees the costs they’re incurring in help desk operations, and how to help their organization minimize them.

In terms of costs, in a poll of the attendees, we found that more than 55% of attendees did not know the costs of a trouble ticket escalation. And for those that did know their costs, more than half reported high trouble ticket escalation costs of $50-$150. So, we spent time walking through help desk metrics, goals, challenges and benchmark costs.

Benchmark data is always useful, so let’s run through that briefly. While there haven’t been studies done to estimate costs specifically for mobility support, the Help Desk Institute  [HDI] has calculated that, in general for desktop support, Level 1 support costs $25 per user, while costs soar to $100 per user for Level 2 and $275 for Level 3.  These costs can add up, when you consider that, in the typical organization, >50% of mobile support calls are escalated and resolved at Level 2 and >15% are escalated and resolved at Level 3.

Take, for example, the case of a large multinational media company. This group has approximately 5,000 BlackBerry users and 15 BES, and, prior to deploying BoxTone, was averaging about 300 help desk calls per month that escalated to Level 2 and 3.  The organization tracked its internal costs to be $100 per escalation – or $30,000 a month – because its help desk didn’t have the visibility and tools resolve issues on the first try.

Then the organization deployed the BoxTone Service Desk  module, which enables even junior help desk staff to resolve 70-80% of the issues themselves, the first time. By having one-click access to the status of service, root cause of the problem, and simple resolutions including BoxTone’s unique 1-Click Fix-It, the help desk staff was able to cut escalations by more than half in just the first 60 days of deployment, saving more than $15,000 a month.

With this in mind, during the webinar we discussed two approaches to reducing help desk escalations and costs.

1. Provide automation to the help desk through the BoxTone Service Desk Module  so they can fix most issues in just a few minutes. This includes hundreds of issues like activation/provisioning, send/receive errors for numerous different reasons, device errors like low memory and out of coverage, mail server errors like Exchange mailbox full and Domino state database problems, carrier issues, network and ActiveDirectory issues, and more.
2. Provide automation to the mobile user themselves through the User Self-Service module called myBoxTone Expert– which CIO.com calls the “on-device IT help desk.” This is a smartphone-based application that alerts the mobile user to issues and provides simple step-by-step fixes, which prevents the help desk call in the first place. And if for some reason the mobile user needs to call, it includes remote troubleshooting and diagnostic tools to speed the resolution.

So let’s walk through a simple scenario of this one-two punch for reducing help desk calls and escalations. Benchmark studies from Gartner and our own customers show that  in the average organization, a mobile user may call help desk 4 times per year. With BoxTone’s User Self-Service module, that should eliminate at least 1 of the 4. Of the 3 remaining, with BoxTone’s Service Desk module should enable the help desk to resolve 2 to 3 of the issues themselves. That means at best only 1 issue or 25% is escalated. That’s clearly a better life for both the service desk team and for the messaging team – and a better overall experience for the mobile user. In the webinar we walked through a sample financial module that you can take and use in your organization.

If you would like to learn more about calculating  – and significantly reducing – the costs associated with your organization’s help desk, you can take a look at our ROI calculator and we’d like to invite you to listen to a replay of our webinar which you can now run on demand.

The Brians

Tags: Add new tag, Best Practices, Cost Savings, Event, Management & Monitoring

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 7:35 am and is filed under Mobile User Management, Service Desk & Support, Strategy & Best Practices, Telecom & Expense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.