Two-Thirds of IT Help Desks in the Education Sector Fail to Meet First Call Resolution Goals

Two-Thirds of IT Help Desks in the Education Sector Fail to Meet First Call Resolution Goals

RIDGELAND, Miss. – The HDI Benchmark Report for Education – released today by Bomgar, the worldwide leader in secure, appliance-based remote support – reports that a mere 34 percent of IT support centers within the Education sector meet their first call resolution (FCR) targets.  On average, education help desks achieved an FCR of 62.6 percent, slightly below the 64.1 percent average across all industries in 2009.

Each year, HDI, a global association for IT service and technical support professionals and the premier certification body for the industry, publishes the Practices and Salary Survey to provide organizations with benchmarks against which to measure their support center’s performance.  For the first time, this new supplemental report from Bomgar offers benchmark data specific to the education sector. The findings reveal that while support centers within education consistently perform below help desks in other industries, they have a tremendous opportunity to introduce new IT support processes and technology.  Data shows that their end-users are extremely adaptable to receiving support through new channels, making it easier for educational organizations to explore more progressive and cost-effective means of IT support.

According to the Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers by Gartner, Inc., April 9, 2010, “a new generation of customers has a deep resistance to telephone-based customer service.”  As the first to service this new generation, educational organizations have risen to the challenge of offering different support channels.  While nearly all help desks still provide phone support, education help desks surpass other industries in also offering self-help tools and online chat support. 

“IT leaders in education have to satisfy two extreme user types: the earliest adopters, or students, and the late adopters, academics and teachers,” said Nathan McNeill, co-founder and VP of product strategy at Bomgar.  “This has forced them to offer support through a wide variety of channels, from phone to e-mail to chat.  Unfortunately, service benchmarks continue to be set by the private sector, meaning education IT departments need to step it up across all of these channels to meet the expectations of both students and staff.”

Other key findings in the report include:

• While 63 percent of education help desks hit their target for Average Speed to Answer (ASA), less than half met their targeted Abandonment rate (49 percent).
• Nearly all education support centers (95.4 percent) use email as a support channel, but more than 50 percent of incidents received by email take two or more exchanges, negating the efficiency gains.
• While 44 percent of respondents considered online chat an essential component of an effective education support center, only 30 percent are using online chat.
• Averages across all industries suggest that median per-incident cost with chat are almost half that of phone incidents and one-third less expensive than email incidents.

The report is an invaluable tool for education support managers to assess performance against peers and optimize their IT support organizations.  To download the full report, please click here. 

BOMGAR Contacts:

Liz Shulof
Director of Public Relations, Bomgar Corporation
lshulof@bomgar.com
770.407.1876

Bomgar is the worldwide leader in secure, appliance-based remote support. The company’s award winning solutions enable organizations to improve IT support efficiency by securely accessing and managing virtually any system – Mac, Linux, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile smartphones plus all versions of Windows. Over 5,000 leading companies around the world have deployed Bomgar’s enterprise-class solutions to transform their IT support functions and significantly improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction while dramatically reducing costs. Bomgar is a privately-held company headquartered in Ridgeland, Mississippi with offices in Atlanta, San Francisco, Washington DC, Paris and London. In 2009, Bomgar was named one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the US by Inc. Magazine.

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