How to Measure Service Desk Efficiency and Why Most Organisations Get It Wrong 

What determines service desk efficiency, why most organisations are measuring the wrong thing, and how one ratio changes the conversation. 

Gary likes cake. This is well established. He arrived with something from a bakery he had passed on the way out, which takes longer than you would think because there is not much between here and anywhere. I put the kettle on. As I crossed the kitchen to fill it, the floor gave its usual groan under the window. I have lived with that sound long enough that I genuinely do not hear it anymore. 

If you read the last piece, you will know I have been thinking about floorboards. 

We were not supposed to be talking about service desk costs. Gary had come out to go through something else entirely. But somewhere between the first cup and the second slice, he asked me what I had been hearing from CIOs this month. I told him. Cost. Always cost. The Gartner numbers from this year say 76% of CEOs have set cost reduction as a top objective for their CIO. And nearly half of all digital initiatives are already underperforming against expectations. Every CIO I speak to has a version of that conversation sitting on their desk. And almost every one of them starts in the same place. Headcount. How many people have we got and how do we have fewer of them. 

Gary put his fork down. 

Gary: You just stepped over it again. 

He said it the way he says most things. Quietly. Not unkindly. I had not heard the floor creak. I never do anymore. But Gary had heard it the moment I walked across the kitchen, and he had been waiting. 

He was not talking about the floor. 

He meant I had gone straight to headcount. Which I had. Which I always do. Which, it turns out, is exactly the wrong place to start. 

The problem with headcount as a measure is not that it is irrelevant. People are seventy to seventy-five per cent of the total service desk cost, sometimes more. So it feels like the right thing to look at. The difficulty is that headcount in isolation tells you what the floor is made of. It does not tell you whether it is holding weight. 

Gary has a different starting point. One ratio. Agents to employees. How many support staff does it take to serve the size of your organisation. That is the number. Not headcount. Not ticket volume. Not first call resolution or average handling time or any of the other things that end up on dashboards and get presented to boards who nod and move on. 

The ratio is the beam. 

Gary: We have one client where that number started at 225 employees per support agent. Thirty months later, it was 773 to one. Same organisation. Growing headcount. The business was getting bigger, and the support function was getting proportionally leaner. That is what the ratio looks like when it is working. 

Keyvan: And that includes outsourced resource? 

Gary: That is exactly the right question. No. And this is where a lot of organisations muddy the water without realising it. If part of your desk is outsourced, those numbers need to come out of the ratio. What you are trying to measure is the efficiency of what you control. The moment you fold a contracted resource in without accounting for it, you are not measuring efficiency anymore. You are measuring a contract. Those are different problems. 

Keyvan: And getting an outsourced provider to improve their own efficiency is not straightforward. 

Gary: It is genuinely hard. How do you build that incentive into the contract terms? Pay per body, they have no reason to need fewer bodies. Pay per ticket, they have no reason to resolve things faster. It is possible to structure it well, but most organisations do not. So you end up with a portion of your cost that is essentially fixed and opaque, sitting inside a number you think you are managing. 

I asked him why more organisations do not track the ratio properly in the first place, outsourcing aside. 

Gary: The ticket data is in the ITSM tool. The headcount is in HR. The agent numbers are complicated because half of them are not full-time on the desk. So the three numbers that would tell you everything are sitting in three different places, and nobody ever puts them together. 

That is the soft spot. Not the numbers themselves. The gap between them. 

Once you have the ratio, the next question is what moves it. And this is where most organisations reach for the wrong answer a second time. They invest in self-service. The portal goes live, there is an announcement, and someone puts together a slide with an arrow pointing up. And then six months later, the ticket volumes have not moved, and nobody quite knows why. 

Gary: The consequence of that confusion is real. When automation is working well, agent-handled volumes can actually go up — because faster processing means more throughput from the same number of people. That is not a warning sign. It is often evidence that something is working. The ratio is what tells you which one you are looking at. 

Gary: If the ratio is improving, something is working. It is the primary measure — the one that tells you whether the direction of travel is right, without requiring you to hold three other numbers in your head at the same time. 

Both levers move the ratio. Self-service by reducing demand on agents. Automation by increasing what each agent can handle. They show up differently on the graph, but the ratio captures both. 

The other thing worth knowing is that this model does not belong to IT. Run the same ratio for HR, for Finance, for Facilities, for any function that handles demand from the employee base. Suddenly, you can see across the whole organisation which functions are becoming more efficient over time and which ones have been standing on softwood for years. 

Gary: The CIO is not the only person in the room with a cost problem. And when you show a Head of HR that ratio sitting flat for three years, that is a different conversation entirely. 

Gary finished his cake. I topped up the tea. Outside it was getting dark earlier than it should, the way it does in late autumn when you are not quite ready for it. 

We had not solved anything yet. But I knew something I had not known two hours earlier. The ratio is not a complicated idea. That is the point. The complexity is in what moves it and what gets in the way. In Part 2 we get into exactly that: contact strategy, where automation actually has an impact, and how you build a baseline that tells you whether anything you are doing is working. 

The floor is the same floor. Same organisation, same desk, same cost pressure. We just finally know where to start looking. 

By Keyvan Shirnia, Chief Revenue Officer, Fusion GBS  With Gary, Chief Technology Officer.

Gary has spent twenty years at Fusion GBS working across technology and service operations. In that time, he has built service management functions across telecommunications, financial services, retail, defence, and healthcare — and spent most of that time figuring out how to make them work better than anyone thought they could. He is still the person in the room asking why nobody has fixed it yet. 

This blog is part of The Six Critical Capabilities series. Part 2 continues the conversation on contact strategy, channel design, and how to build a baseline that tells you whether anything you are doing is working. The founding piece, The 2 AM Trap can be read here.