What a slow IT response actually costs a 25-person business
Everyone knows slow IT support is annoying. Fewer people have worked out what it costs. The arithmetic is simple and the number is bigger than most support contracts.
Here's a sum most businesses never do. Take a 25-person firm. Each person has, on average, one IT problem a fortnight that stops them working. Some weeks it's nothing, some weeks it's the printer, the login, the email that won't send, the file that won't open. One every two weeks is conservative.
The arithmetic
If each problem takes two hours to get resolved, between logging it, waiting, chasing and the fix itself, that's 25 people, 26 problems a year each, two hours a time: 1,300 hours a year. At a fully loaded cost of £25 an hour, which is low for professional staff, that's £32,500 a year of paid time spent waiting for IT.
Now change one number. Make the average resolution 20 minutes instead of two hours. The same firm loses 217 hours, or about £5,400. The difference is £27,000 a year, for a business that probably pays less than that for its entire IT support contract.
That's before the knock-on effects, which are the ones people actually feel: the quote that went out late, the client call taken on a mobile in the car park, the invoice run pushed to Monday.
Why response time, not resolution time, is the number to ask about
Most of the two hours in the first sum isn't fixing. It's waiting. Waiting for someone to pick up, waiting for the ticket to be looked at, waiting for a call back. The fix itself is often minutes. So the single biggest lever on the cost of IT problems is how quickly a competent person starts on them.
When you're comparing providers, ask for their response time as a number, and ask who responds. A call handler who logs a ticket and promises a callback has not responded to anything. An engineer who starts working on the problem has.
The other half: problems that never happen
The second lever is fewer problems in the first place. Proactive monitoring, patching and replacing equipment before it fails takes a chunk out of the 26 problems a year figure. It's less visible than a fast fix, because nobody notices the outage that didn't happen, but over a year it's where a lot of the money is.
What we do
We built Systemwork around response time because it's the number that matters most to a business's actual output. Every client gets a round-the-clock service desk staffed by engineers, proactive monitoring included, and a fixed monthly price per user. If you'd like to know what your current setup is costing you in waiting time, the free audit is a good place to start.