On a fixed-price service contract, every ticket is a cost. Under time-and-materials, a printer that breaks every week was income. Paid per user or per device, it’s margin walking out of the door, one twelve-minute call at a time.
Most providers know this in general. Fewer have put a number on it for a specific client. It’s worth doing.
A rough sum for one client
Take a made-up but not unusual client: 3,000 users, raising about 0.8 tickets per user a month. That’s 2,400 tickets a month.
Now go through the last quarter’s tickets and pick out the repeats: problems your team has fixed before, in the same way, more than a handful of times. Restarting a service, clearing a cache, reconnecting a VPN client, freeing up disk space. In many estates that’s a quarter of the volume or more. Call it 600 a month.
At fifteen minutes of first-line time each, that’s 150 hours a month, close to one full-time analyst, spent on problems with a known answer. And that’s before counting the people waiting on hold while it happens.
Your figures will be different. But the number tends to be big enough to change how you price the renewal.
Why it doesn’t get fixed
Nobody on the desk wants to answer the same ticket every week. It keeps happening for familiar reasons:
- The fix lives in one engineer’s head, or in a script on their laptop.
- Each client’s estate is a little different, so automating for one feels like a project.
- Nobody owns “make this ticket go away”, because the contract measures how fast you answer it.
What changes when they stop
When repeat problems are fixed on the device instead of by a person, a few things shift at once.
Your cost to serve each client falls, and keeps falling as you cover more problems. Your engineers spend their time on the tickets that need them, which is better for them and for the client. And your conversation at renewal changes: instead of defending response times, you’re showing the client problems that stopped happening, which is a much easier meeting to walk into.
It also sets you up for experience-based contracts, which more clients are starting to ask for. We wrote about that in Green SLAs, Annoyed Employees.
The bit clients see
One more thing to think about: whose name is on it. If the fix pops up on the employee’s screen, it should look like your service, not like another vendor’s product. That’s where white-label support matters more than it first seems.
What we built for providers
Nanoheal is built for providers as much as for in-house IT. It’s multi-tenant, with per-tenant branding and licence pools, and your branding goes on the client, the installer and the download page. Pricing is a subscription per managed device, which fits the way you already charge. There’s more on the service providers page, or send us one client’s top call drivers through the automation assessment and we’ll show you what’s covered.