Cost Savings « BoxTone Blog — News and Commentary for the Mobile Enterprise Professional

Webinar Recap: Time to Take Control of Wireless BlackBerry Expenses (More than TEM and WEM)

June 8th, 2009

To many organizations, wireless expenses can seem like a black hole. You want all your mobile users getting the most from their devices… and your company wants to get the most for the dollars spent. But can you tell who’s doing what? Do you know where all the costs are? Are you doing everything you can to trim those expenses? Clearly cutting off all BlackBerry use is not the way to go.

BoxTone for BlackBerry TCO ROI WEM TEM

In our experience, lack of detailed visibility, tools and process often gets in the way of reigning in mobile expenses. So, on Wednesday, May 27, BoxTone hosted a webinar with analyst/editor Joanie Wexler – author of Network World’s Wireless in the Enterprise newsletter and The Voice Report’s The Wireless Pulse e-zine – to examine the evolution of WEM and how to optimize TCO.

The webinar – entitled “Time to Take Control of Your BlackBerry Expenses” – looked at how Telecom Expense Management (TEM) is now expanding to Wireless Expense Management (WEM), discussed models for calculating both ROI and TCO for BlackBerry, and then explored 3 approaches for trimming BlackBerry wireless expense.

From an ROI perspective, typically BlackBerry brings 1 hour of additional productivity per user per business day which can compute to be $15,000 or more per mobile user per year, says Ipsos-Reid. Likewise annual TCO can range between $2,100 and $2,500 per user, according to Gartner. So we see great ROI ratios but a cost we all want to trim where we can.

The webinar includes formulas that you can use for calculating your own TCO and ROI. The TCO model suggests $1550 average cost which includes $775 in carrier/external expenses (annual data plans, data roaming, support) and $775 in internal IT Operations expenses (server hw/sw, support, operations, training). Many people only think of the data plans when they think of wireless expenses, and that’s only half the pie.

Jonie reviewed results from Aberdeen Research that calculates effective Wireless Expense Management (WEM) can save enterprises $276 per mobile user each year – about 42 percent off a typical organization’s annual wireless data service plan.

But for large BlackBerry smartphone deployments, effective WEM is almost impossible because responsibility can span multiple departments with no single owner (IT Operations, PC support, and Telcom) and organizations rarely have real-time visibility into actual usage and the tools/processes to manage total cost to serve.

So the webinar details three approaches to reducing TCO:

Tracking actual in-the-field activity for data plan use and roaming
Deploying support automation and user self-service for fewer incidents with lower support costs
Tracking underutilized devices to reallocate or decommission

The cost savings potential is substantial:

Save ~ $77,500 in no-use & low-use device recapture @ 5%
Save ~ $142,500 in IT mobile support costs @ HD
Total hard cost savings of $220,000 per 1000 users (or $220 per user)

You can calculate your own cost savings potential here.

If you’re in telecom procurement, mobile messaging, finance, or head up expense teams responsible for BlackBerry services, this session is one you can’t afford to miss. To view a free replay of “Time to Take Control of Your BlackBerry Expenses,” click here.

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Tags: Best Practices, BlackBerry, Cost Savings, Management & Monitoring
Posted in Enterprise-Grade, Mobile User Management, Strategy & Best Practices, Telecom & Expense | No Comments »

Webinar Recap: Helping the Help Desk Slash BlackBerry Support Escalations and Costs

April 7th, 2009

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.

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.
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

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Tags: Add new tag, Best Practices, Cost Savings, Event, Management & Monitoring
Posted in Mobile User Management, Service Desk & Support, Strategy & Best Practices, Telecom & Expense | No Comments »

Hands Off My BlackBerry: Cutting Costs Doesn’t Mean Cutting Off BlackBerry Devices

December 4th, 2008

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.

BoxTone for BlackBerry Poll -- Innovation vs. Necessity

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.

BoxTone for BlackBerry Poll -- Time to Resolve Trouble Tickets

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

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