What It Costs to Get to the Service

A support ticket can stay open all day before an engineer gets ten minutes with the failing service. What would it be worth to change that?

Suppose an overnight batch misses its window. The vendor’s engineer wants to know whether the transaction service is still making progress. The customer sends the overnight log. It tells the engineer when the batch started. What the engineer needs now is a look at the live queue.

The customer has someone who can run the query. She’s available after lunch. By then the queue may have cleared on its own, which is good news for today’s batch and less helpful to the person who will be on call tomorrow.

In the last field note I wrote about what it costs to take custody of a customer’s diagnostic files. There’s another cost in this exchange. Two organizations have people qualified to answer a fairly simple question, and they spend part of the day arranging for one of them to ask it.

What the ticket clock can tell you

Say the engineer spends twenty minutes reviewing the log and writing instructions, then another twenty on a call walking the customer through the query. Four hours pass between the request and the answer. If the engineer worked other cases in the meantime, charging four hours of labor to this ticket would overstate the cost. The customer still waited four hours. And a live observation that was possible at eight in the morning may be impossible at noon.

I’d keep both figures. Engineer time tells a support director something about staffing. Elapsed time tells the customer something about the service they received. For a missed batch, the more consequential question may be whether anyone got an answer in time to rerun it.

Putting a price against the hours

Thirp Cloud for Support is live now, so there’s an actual price to put against that example. Assume, for the sake of arithmetic, that an hour of support engineering time costs the vendor $100 fully loaded. Substitute your own figure. Here’s how much engineering time a team would have to recover each month to cover the subscription on labor alone.

Published monthly pricing

At thirty environments, two escalations a month that each save four hours would cover $749. The same two escalations saving forty minutes apiece would recover about $133 of engineering time. Both are plausible on paper. Which one resembles your ticket history?

Recovered time matters if the team can use it. Payroll may be exactly the same next month. The benefit might show up as a senior engineer getting through two more cases, or as a customer getting the batch rerun before the next shift starts. I wouldn’t assign a dollar value to either without asking the people who did the work.

The quiet sites count, too

The subscription covers environments through their quiet months. If three customers account for most of the difficult cases, those three may justify enrollment quite readily. The other twenty-seven deserve their own arithmetic. Some may already give the vendor a prompt, approved way to reach the service. Some may need help only once a year. It is entirely reasonable to arrive at different answers for different customers.

There’s also work on the customer’s side. Someone has to review the agent, agree on which service the vendor may reach, and decide who can approve and end a session. A fair comparison includes that person’s time alongside the calls and log collection the existing process asks of them.

Try it against a closed ticket

For the 30-day trial, I’d start with a case both sides remember. Reproduce it in the vendor’s own environment first. Then, with one willing customer, have their approver grant access to the named service, let the support engineer run the diagnostic, and have the approver end the connection. Check the access record together.

How customer approval works

Now put the old ticket next to what you just did. Which calls or handoffs would have disappeared? Which steps would still have taken just as long? Above all, would the engineer have seen the queue while there was still something in it to see?

Support software in customer-controlled environments?

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This piece first appeared on thirp.net.