End-User Support Costs: Be Careful Where You Cut

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By: Paul Bonner (10/8/2010)

For better or worse, the quality of end-user support has long been the litmus test of an IT organization’s ability to serve the needs of the business. There is no glamour to the support role, and there’s no glory when it comes to selling management on the strategic necessity of a support budget. Even so, it’s impossible for IT to meet its requirements to the organization without an effective end-user support program. Unfortunately, that lack of glamour or strategic value puts support squarely in the sights of budget slashers, resulting in constant pressure to cut services or headcount. Of the many possible ways to respond to that pressure, some initiatives advance the IT organization’s mission, while others undermine it. One of the most common cost-cutting measures, for example, is also one of the most damaging: across-the-board service cuts. You pass out a few hundred copies of The Idiot's Guide to Microsoft Office and shut down your support desk. While that might seem to be exactly the sort of medicine that the bean-counters are calling for, it is clearly counterproductive; all you get in the end is lower employee productivity and more anti-IT sentiment. Automated help systems (“Press 1 if you're experiencing the blue screen of death; Press 2 if ...”) are another seemingly attractive option, but smart IT organizations balance their enthusiasm for these solutions against the awareness that employees generally despise them. Since some problems always require a live support representative, and since a typical user gets more irritated with each menu he or she navigates without finding the solution, it is important to design automated systems with a great deal of care and thought. A well-designed automated helpdesk system, for example, should never make the user listen to more than four menus without either providing a response germane to the user's issue or transferring him to a live representative. If you’re not sure whether your automated system is living up to this standard, then it’s time to invest in the analytics tools required to find out – or to get out of the automated help-desk game altogether. In the long run, however, the most effective way to reduce support costs is to reduce the number of support issues. For that, you need well-designed back-office helpdesk systems to track every issue. A good help desk application will, for example, enable support technicians to quickly identify issues and provide solutions based on previous related issues. Just as important, it should track the resolution of every issue – an important way to gauge your support team’s effectiveness and to document its impact on business productivity. Finally, make no mistake: There’s a difference between resolving support issues and papering them over with temporary workarounds. Coming up with a workaround for a serious issue just means you'll face it again soon. The most effective policy is to reject delivery of a workaround as sufficient grounds to close an issue, and to enforce this policy with your internal developers as well as your outside vendors. Instead, demand a permanent fix for every issue before it is closed. If an issue can't be permanently resolved at the current time, demand that the developers provide a deferred remediation plan documenting why it cannot be fixed at the moment and exactly what steps need to be taken to fix it in the future. The challenge in end-user support today is to reduce costs while maintaining or improving service levels across the organization. That means pushing back against efforts to cut support costs in ways that damage end-user productivity. Your business, and your IT staff, deserves nothing less.

For better or worse, the quality of end-user support has long been the litmus test of an IT organization’s ability to serve the needs of the business. There is no glamour to the support role, and there’s no glory when it comes to selling management on the strategic necessity of a support budget. Even so, it’s impossible for IT to meet its requirements to the organization without an effective end-user support program.

Unfortunately, that lack of glamour or strategic value puts support squarely in the sights of budget slashers, resulting in constant pressure to cut services or headcount. Of the many possible ways to respond to that pressure, some initiatives advance the IT organization’s mission, while others undermine it.

One of the most common cost-cutting measures, for example, is also one of the most damaging: across-the-board service cuts. You pass out a few hundred copies of The Idiot's Guide to Microsoft Office and shut down your support desk. While that might seem to be exactly the sort of medicine that the bean-counters are calling for, it is clearly counterproductive; all you get in the end is lower employee productivity and more anti-IT sentiment.

Automated help systems (“Press 1 if you're experiencing the blue screen of death; Press 2 if ...”) are another seemingly attractive option, but smart IT organizations balance their enthusiasm for these solutions against the awareness that employees generally despise them. Since some problems always require a live support representative, and since a typical user gets more irritated with each menu he or she navigates without finding the solution, it is important to design automated systems with a great deal of care and thought. A well-designed automated helpdesk system, for example, should never make the user listen to more than four menus without either providing a response germane to the user's issue or transferring him to a live representative.

If you’re not sure whether your automated system is living up to this standard, then it’s time to invest in the analytics tools required to find out – or to get out of the automated help-desk game altogether.

In the long run, however, the most effective way to reduce support costs is to reduce the number of support issues. For that, you need well-designed back-office helpdesk systems to track every issue. A good help desk application will, for example, enable support technicians to quickly identify issues and provide solutions based on previous related issues. Just as important, it should track the resolution of every issue – an important way to gauge your support team’s effectiveness and to document its impact on business productivity.

Finally, make no mistake: There’s a difference between resolving support issues and papering them over with temporary workarounds. Coming up with a workaround for a serious issue just means you'll face it again soon. The most effective policy is to reject delivery of a workaround as sufficient grounds to close an issue, and to enforce this policy with your internal developers as well as your outside vendors. Instead, demand a permanent fix for every issue before it is closed. If an issue can't be permanently resolved at the current time, demand that the developers provide a deferred remediation plan documenting why it cannot be fixed at the moment and exactly what steps need to be taken to fix it in the future.

The challenge in end-user support today is to reduce costs while maintaining or improving service levels across the organization. That means pushing back against efforts to cut support costs in ways that damage end-user productivity. Your business, and your IT staff, deserves nothing less.