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In this video, we discuss the ROI of Service and Support and specifically the ROI of the Service Desk.

Service Desk ROI | Metrics Unleashed with Jeff Rumburg

ROI simply means return on investment. It’s a ratio, return is the numerator and investment is the denominator. The investment piece of ROI is simply your annual operating cost. The return piece of ROI is a bit harder to determine, but not impossible by any stretch.

Return, or economic value, is created in at least four ways by a service desk.

First, you can reduce ticket volume through problem management. For example, if I’m able to reduce ticket volume from 1.5 tickets per user per month to just 1 ticket per user per month, I’m creating value equal to the .5 tickets saved multiplied by the cost per ticket multiplied by the number of end users.

The second source of value is what we call channel mix. By deflecting contacts into lower cost channels, you create economic return. If you drive some of your volume from voice to self-help for example, you can add to your return in ROI because self-help is a much lower cost channel than voice or chat.

Thirdly, you can shift-left. For example, if you move some tickets from field services or desktop support to level 1 support, and resolve them remotely instead of desk-side or device-side, you can reduce your total cost of ownership in Service and Support. This also adds to the R in ROI.

Finally, and this is the biggest contributor to economic value, an effective service desk returns productive hours to end users. That returned productivity can be quantified and monetized. It turns out that the number can be quite large.

When you add together these four sources of economic value, the R in ROI can be quite substantial. As part of every Service Desk Peer Group Benchmark and One Year Path to World-Class Performance, MetricNet calculates the ROI of the Service Desk. ROIs of 500% or more are not unusual – meaning that the economic value created by a service desk is 5X or more the annual operating expense.

If you’re interested in calculating your Service Desk ROI, we also offer a downloadable Service Desk ROI Calculator.

Jeffrey Rumburg

Jeff Rumburg is a co-founder and Managing Partner of MetricNet, where he is responsible for global strategy, product development, and financial operations for the company. As a leading expert in benchmarking and re-engineering, Mr. Rumburg authored a best selling book on benchmarking, and has been retained as a benchmarking expert by such well known companies as American Express, Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, IBM, and Sony. Mr. Rumburg was honored in 2014 by receiving the Ron Muns Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the IT Service and Support industry. Prior to co-founding MetricNet, Mr. Rumburg was president and founder of The Verity Group, an international management consulting firm specializing in IT benchmarking. While at Verity, Mr. Rumburg launched a number of syndicated benchmarking services that provided low cost benchmarks to more than 1,000 corporations worldwide. Mr. Rumburg has also held a number of executive positions at META Group, and Gartner. As a vice president at Gartner, Mr. Rumburg led a project team that reengineered Gartner’s global benchmarking product suite. And as vice president at META Group, Mr. Rumburg’s career was focused on business and product development for IT benchmarking. Mr. Rumburg’s education includes an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School, an M.S. magna cum laude in Operations Research from Stanford University, and a B.S. magna cum laude in Mechanical Engineering. He is author of A Hands-On Guide to Competitive Benchmarking: The Path to Continuous Quality and Productivity Improvement, and has taught graduate-level engineering and business courses.

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