One of the most frequent questions John Ragsdale and I get here at the TSIA is about the average costs per service incident. Going forward, we will be gathering some detailed service incident cost data in our new  TSIA member benchmark survey. The new benchmark survey, which launches in early July, will gather detailed service operational data for both FIELD SERVICE and SOFTWARE SUPPORT operations.
A couple of months ago Bill Rose, founder of the SSPA (now TSIA) fielded a survey about the backlog status of service incidents. In that survey we also asked a simple question about the cost of a service incident. I can report the data gathered from that baseline question here.
I removed extreme outlier numbers before calculating the averages. For example, one company reported $10,000 per incident. While that may be an accurate cost for that company, it unduly distorts the average. A few other companies recorded service incident costs of $0.00. I don’t know how one has a service incident cost of precisely zero dollars. I removed both of these outliers before calculating the averages. The resulting average costs per service incident reported by the survey respondents are:
- Hardware service providers = $306 per service incident
- Software service providers = $233 per service incident
There’s no further breakdown here, just an initial baseline figure. As I mentioned, our new TSIA member benchmark survey will gather more detailed information about the costs of providing service to your customers.
If you’re a TSIA member, I hope you will complete the new survey as quickly as you are able. If you are not member of the TSIA, I encourage you to consider membership. Our extensive, expanded, and exclusive member benchmark survey captures service and support operational data that is simply not available anywhere else, or from any other organization in the world. Contact Me if you would like to learn more.
Thanks for your interest – IT MATTERS!
MICHAEL ISRAEL