The service desk is the last place you should try to cut back.
For external-facing organizations, quality support keeps customer loyalty and repeat business high and ensures that partners and suppliers can do business with you cost effectively. For your IT organization, which supports internal customers, quality service drives up employee productivity by ensuring that problems are resolved, questions are answered, and requests are filled promptly. Having a solid service desk, where agents can quickly prioritize issues based on business impact, also helps you prevent or minimize outages of business-critical services and the associated lost revenues.
With service being as important as it is, does the idea of cutting hundreds of thousands — even millions — of dollars in spending on service desk operations seem a bit crazy? Simply slashing service budgets would, of course, be risky and ill advised. Service desk consolidation, however, is a smart move. This highly successful strategy is yielding dramatic reductions in service costs while delivering significant improvements in efficiency and service quality. Here are a few examples:
  • After consolidating 25 service desks into one, a global telecom company realized a 30 percent reduction in mean time to repair, a 60 percent reduction in unplanned downtime, and a $32 million savings for the organization’s IT service management consolidation efforts.
  • A billion-dollar energy supplier cut service desk costs from $89 to $57 per hour and realized an annual savings of more than $17 million.
  • A major insurer consolidated multiple service desks, facilitated the adoption of IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®) best practices, and saved $2.5 million.
  • »A leading financial services firm retired 40 service desk tools, reduced case volumes up to 80 percent, and, in the first six months, reduced the change-to incident ratio by 10 percent.

These enterprises didn’t just blindly slash the budgets of their service desk operations. Instead, they changed their approaches in ways that enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. As a result, they cut service desk spending and increased ROI in the processes, technology, and people that enable service excellence.
If your enterprise has multiple service desks in different geographies using disparate, disjointed tools and supporting diverse but possibly overlapping constituencies, you may be wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. Service desk consolidation is a proven strategy for eliminating that waste. Companies that consolidate realize tangible, quantifiable benefits, including lower customer service costs, enhanced service quality, and improved customer satisfaction. Clearly, these companies aren’t merely trying to barely get by on service. They recognize service desk consolidation as a smart business strategy that drives customer satisfaction up while driving costs down.