Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a whole ship.
– Benjamin Franklin
Now imagine your company as a ship and the IT help desk services as the engine room that propels the ship.
Will you be able to notice a minuscule leak in the engine room until it sinks at least half of the whole ship called your company?
The answer is an unfortunate “no!”
To be more practical, you might only notice the leak when it is too late to salvage the entire ship (remember Titanic?!).
Giving a damn about saving money might not look like a thing at all, but it really is an essential one that will act as a lifeboat, if not now, later.
Yup! Reportedly, the average ticket cost per ticket is $15.56, with lows of $2.93 and highs of $46.69, and the average cost per minute of a ticket is $1.60.
With the monstrously growing size of the IT Help Desk industry, with a market value of US$ 10.9 Bn, one can only think of having their team within the blinds to patch up the minute leaks as soon as they are formed.
One might be tempted to blindly sign layoffs, but an IT Help Desk team is all about having a pool of experts to make the wheels spin.
Touch them, and you are signing your deal with the devil himself (hear the impending doom approaching? You will). So, that area has been blocked.
There is another easy way around, but it needs some work. Not the sort of leg work that we do for you, just go through what we have to offer you here. That is all we demand of you.
The official and ultimate goal of this blog post is to make you informed about the nuances (which can very well be called advanced tricks) that will help you save money when it comes to your IT help desk services.
Below are the five broad steps, which, of course, have a number of simple and small tricks etched, sculpted, and bound within those steps. Splash some water in your eyes and start reading!
1. Stop Living With the Excavated Ancient Stuff
Do you have an old PC that is giving you a lot of trouble?
Older technology is typically more expensive to maintain, and after a while, it’s less expensive to simply purchase a new desktop than it is to continue pouring money into something that always appears to be broken.
It’s a great time to buy workstations, and if money is tight, you can even get refurbished desktops.
With that done,
You should also consider a more advanced trick to cut the cost of the devices and services.
Accelerate the development of centralized and shared services by leveraging enterprise-wide competencies and reducing the number of employees embedded in business units.
Moving to shared services saves organizations 15% to 20% of their costs. However, proceed with caution. Begin by benchmarking your current costs and mapping your operations so you know who you must retain and who can be let go.
2. Pump it Up and Keep Your Efficiency on the Excited State
Your utility bill from the electric company will decrease if you reduce the amount of energy your technology uses each day.
If you’re still using old CRT dinosaurs, switching to LCD monitors and enforcing company-wide policies to turn off monitors or put workstations to sleep at night can make a big difference.
Speaking of Which,
One is also reminded to jump to the next simple habit that will help you cut the budget in half (Caution Ahead!)
There have been numerous acquisitions in the industry. Small fries have been snapped up by large vendors with just 1,000 customers apiece. It’s much easier for them to apply boilerplate policies to inherited customers and then wait for complaints than it is to review contracts individually. You can save 5% to 10% by correcting those invoices or by being tough when agreeing to a new contract.
So, make the verification of invoices a priority!
3. Say a Big No to Parasites, Good Riddance Vendors!
Your hard drive crashed, not so you could spend time on the phone with a PC manufacturer. That’s not why you recruited your personnel.
Businesses lose money by paying staff to continually engage in fruitless technical support conversations with vendors.
IT companies with partnerships can complete tasks more quickly. This means problems are promptly fixed and your staff won’t have to deal with unhelpful support.
Coming to Your Staff and Personnel,
Flattening your organization and forming new virtual teams will not only give it a fresh look but also help you save some money by eliminating the ones who keep reinventing the wheel.
More people are working in virtual teams, and the model is lowering administrative overhead costs. It is not uncommon for managers who previously oversaw seven people to now oversee 15 to 20 people.
Kill Your Darlings!
Reduce or eliminate special bonuses, make some redundancies, and reduce regional support. According to reports, 37% of an average budget is spent on people costs, including contractor payments.
And companies had planned to spend $13,454 per employee, which is now down $200, or 1.7% per person. This is a painful subject to highlight, but use a scalpel. Keep people who ensure the most effective transfer of business knowledge.
Have the Experts Handy!
It is usually devastating for the CIOs to see that the cost cut down in some areas has been swallowed up by another, ending up in zero percent savings. Simply put, CIOs take a knife to their budgets, only to find the cost savings have been shifted to other business units.
This can be set right by hiring an accounting expert to assist you in cost-cutting, possibly on a loan or on a temporary contract. In addition, as you make cuts, use legal expertise to review contracts for penalty clauses and other terms.
4. Stop Paying Your Stacked Up Phone Bills, Right Now!
Yes, you read that right. By switching to a Voice Over Internet Protocol or VoIP system, you can stop paying your phone company.
Small firms can reduce their telephone communication costs by up to 80%, so the investment quickly pays for itself. Many VoIP systems enable your customers to use their phones anywhere, increasing your mobility, flexibility, and functionality.
Simply put, deploy IP telephony and Voice over Internet Protocol (cut maintenance costs by 50% to 80%).
Worried About the Enterprise Infra? We’ve Got You Covered
All thanks to the profound reports, we now have in our hands a list of hyper-winning points to cut down on costs—by adopting a set of seemingly trivial yet provenly beneficial practices in enterprise infrastructure—that many industrialists are still blind to.
- Nobody can keep track of this stuff. Use telecom expense management services (save 10% to 35%). Hire a professional to source, benchmark, negotiate the contracts, etc., and audit the bills.
- Who is responsible for individual bills and what devices do they use? The enterprise should take control and set standards. So, for wireless services, switch to corporate liability (save 15% to 30%).
- Reduce a location’s reliability target by “one 9” (save 30%).
- Consolidate rich media conferencing into a multi-control point unit on-premises (save 60%).
- As hardware costs fall, constructing your own videoconferencing center can save you a lot of money in the long run, assuming you do a lot of it.
- Use the Internet for corporate transportation (you can save 10% to 80%).
5. Enhance Your Enterprise Software, Saving Money Simultaneously
Remove all Shelfware
Understand who is using the software you paid for and who is not using it. Remove the latter.
Use alternative products from previous deals. When budgets are plentiful, IT demands tools that it may not require. If you are suggested that you may have to choose between using a tool and keeping a staff member, perhaps you’ll decide you don’t need the tool at this point.
Add Competition to Existing Products
If you want to cut costs, you must encourage vendor competition. If you decide to switch, make sure to factor in the cost of replacing the incumbent. Use “best-for-need” products rather than “best-of-breed.” You could pay up to a 50% premium for the best of the breed.
To Put it all in a Nutshell,
Turn a pair of blind eyes and deaf ears to the ones that say money-saving is not a thing that should get your effort and energy when it comes to business.
In the rapidly growing, gigantic IT realm of today, one has to be able to excavate and see all the nitty gritty about saving money out there.
In this entangled maze called IT Helpdesk Services, one should definitely be aware of where one’s money goes to prevent oneself from wondering where it all went, after breaking the bank blindly.
Use this article as your guide and get an idea of where your money is being spilled like water and disappearing like smoke. Locate the delicate areas, work on them, and see the difference.
P.S. Do not be deceived just because an area seems trivial, remember that a minute leak can drown a ship! Good luck!