Total Support Usage Insights

By combining many data points across hundreds of clients, we have created analytics that provide some insight into how you’re using your Total Support plan. This can help identify opportunities to improve your IT environment and make better use of your services with us.

Users

This is the number of full-time equivalent IT users on your Total Support agreement in that month. For example, if you have users that only use a mobile device and are being billed at a lower rate, then they are weighted based on the price compared to a standard user.

Ticket Volume

The expected volume of tickets is based on data points like the scope of your Total Support agreement (e.g. whether components like application and telephony support are in or out of scope), your F-Protect Managed Security plan, your onsite support arrangement (full time onsite, scheduled visits, on-demand, etc.), any complexity uplifts or discounts due to the IT environment, and the number of users in the previous column. We then compare this to the average across our client base and categorise into bands as follows:

• Extreme: >250% of expected ticket volume
• Very High: 175-250% of expected ticket volume
• High: 125-175% of expected ticket volume
• Normal: 50-125% of expected ticket volume
• Low: <50% of expected ticket volume

While it’s not uncommon to have a high month at times due to project changes or an unplanned issue, consistently high ticket volume can be indicative of a complex or outdated IT environment, gaps in user education, or an opportunity to streamline internal processes. While a consistently low ticket volume can be good to see, it may also show that users aren’t leveraging IT to its fullest capability or that some items aren’t being reported.

Agreement Usage

Whereas Ticket Volume is looking at the number of tickets, Agreement Usage is an indication of the total number of hours worked on your Total Support agreement each month.

The number of tickets is a factor, but overall usage also takes the average time per ticket into account as well as time spent on other components such as routine maintenance, problem management, and technical account management. The usage is categorised into the same bands as Ticket Volume.

Agreement Usage is best evaluated in combination with the Ticket Volume. When Agreement Usage is higher than Ticket Volume, this normally indicates inefficiency that could be caused by technical complexity, extra time spent on “client contact” (such as difficulty getting in touch with end users), repeat problems requiring root cause analysis or a high level of service delivery management or account management.

TAM Usage

TAM Usage is an indication of the overall amount of time your Technical Account Manager has spent across account management, service delivery management, solution design and project scoping during the month. To calculate the expected usage the overall scope of services with First Focus is taken into account, and the bands are the same as the previous sections.

If your TAM Usage is consistently low then you may be able to better leverage their services to provide proactive recommendations for IT. If usage is consistently high then it may indicate a need to add IT Management or IT Strategy services to your Total Support plan, or issues or complexities in the IT environment are requiring more of the TAM’s attention than should normally be required.

BPR

This indicates the last month that a Best Practice Review took place. While we recommend these take place quarterly, they should be completed every 2 quarters at the very least. Other stakeholders in the organisation should also be involved in the BPR process to ensure IT is best aligned with overall business needs and goals.