IT support costs money—that’s undisputed. However, in many companies, these costs remain a mystery within the IT budget. While the total budget is known and ticket volume is recorded, what a single ticket really costs, which issues cause the most work, and which teams are particularly burdened often remains unclear.

Yet, this information is crucial for targeted relief, automation, optimization, and good decision-making.

Why is the traditional approach not enough?

Ticket numbers alone don’t tell you much. What matters is not how many requests you receive, but which ones are especially time-consuming and which tickets cause the most work—and why. A standard ticket with a quick fix is totally different from a request that gets escalated, bounced back and forth in a ticket ping-pong game, or delayed unnecessarily because of missing information.

Average values are often used, such as flat-rate ticket costs. However, these obscure the true cost drivers in IT support. Similarly, viewing support costs as a fixed IT budget without knowing which tasks arise where, how much they vary, and what to plan for is equally unhelpful.

How can you achieve true transparency?

To better understand and control your support costs, start with a simple, structured analysis.

1. Pareto Principle

Determine which tickets require the most effort. Analyze processing times, escalations, and reassignments to do this. Exporting data from the ticket system is usually sufficient. Evaluate this data using Pareto charts. Which categories, teams, services, or requesters have above-average processing times and ticket volumes? This evaluation will form the basis for further calculations.

If timestamps and processing times are missing from the ticket data, ask the experts for their estimates.

2. Cost Base

The cost base is either the fixed costs during the period under review, the imputed hourly rate for internal employees, or the contractual hourly rate for external employees. Distribute this cost base across the support costs per team, as support costs vary greatly from team to team.

Divide the result by the number of tickets to obtain the ticket costs.

3. Reporting

Use the transparency gained to create differentiated reports for management that reveal the real drivers of effort and costs. Decisions regarding planning and the implementation of measures, such as Lean ITSM or Six Sigma for IT, will be much more reliable and effective.

If you want to record and control your support costs and make informed decisions based on your ticket data, we would be happy to show you what your data has to offer.