Devoted to Help Desk and Technical Support personnel and applications

Today some of my colleagues and I had a good laugh, and I need to share it!  Some of my colleague's competitors are running an IT business with a staff that is lopsided with technical support.  They have twenty tech support agents and only 400 customers.  My colleagues have one support person, with one backup person and they have about 400 customers also.  While talking about this, I suddenly pictured a scenario for a commercial where tech support analysts sat around fighting boredom - flying paper airplanes and shooting rubber bands because their product is so good that no one ever calls for support.  (Kind of like the Maytag commercials.)  I decided to do a little research on this topic in order to analyze the current status quo for tech support to user ratio.  Here is a video article by ZDNET, and here is how they break it down.

You need to take three variables into consideration:

1. Complexity – How diverse are the platforms on your network or the product you support?  How many operating systems do you support?  How many different applications, etc?
2. Expertise – Consider the expertise of your techs and your users.  How skilled are your techs at solving issues quickly?  How much assistance do your users require?
3. Trends – Consider current changes/problems that may impact call volume

If you have not implemented a hardware standard throughout your network, your ratio goes down to 45 users to one tech.

If you have implemented restricted admin rights for users your ratio goes down an additional 5.

If your tech staff utilizes remote software deployment (SMS), you may only need one tech for every 70 employees.

If your company uses imaging or cloning, your average may go up to 95 /1

If you implement all of these practices, your ratio should go up to 125/1

The only thing is, I don't think I ever worked with a ratio that low.  The numbers I have worked with are more like 150 - 300 users to one tech.  This was decided by my upper management, it is a good thing that my help desk implements most of these best practices - and that my staff ROCKS!!! ;-)

Here are some other factors that should increase your ratio:

A well written knowledge base that your users can navigate

Regular user and tech support training 

What are your thoughts on this topic?

Related Article:

Does Your Service Desk Measure Up?