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Eliana Nkembo

Marketing Operations Manager

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Service Desk Optimisation: Finding the Real ROI in 2025

In today’s digital world, even a brief IT hiccup can have a knock-on effect across your entire business. People talk about the obvious ticket cost, say £5–£30 a pop, but they often forget the much bigger hit: lost user productivity. Below, I’ll walk you through the latest 2025 benchmarks, show you how to work out the true cost of each support ticket, and explain why shaving down Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) is one of your most powerful levers in delivering IT support.

1. What’s a “Good” MTTR in 2025?

Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) is still the go-to metric for measuring how well your service desk is performing. For mid-market organisations in 2025, the ballpark figures look something like this:

  • Simple issues (e.g. password reset): about 10–30 minutes
  • Moderate issues (e.g. printer not working, VPN or app access problems): roughly 2–6 hours
  • Complex issues (e.g. OS corruption, hardware failure): around 24–72 hours

If you average everything, including tickets sitting with third parties, waiting for parts or languishing in low-priority queues, you end up at about 30 hours overall. In reality though, most UK businesses break that into a “working-hours only” metric or set SLAs assuming around a 2–4-hour productivity-impact window per ticket.

2. Putting a figure on Time: 2025 Salary Data

To turn hours lost into actual cost, we need a salary baseline. Based on ONS data for 2025:

  • Average mid-market employee salary: ~£37,000 per year
  • Hourly rate (assuming 2,000 to keep it simple working hours/year): about £18.50/hour

So, every hour an employee is stuck waiting for IT help is effectively costing around £19.

3. How to Calculate Productivity Loss per Ticket

Here’s a quick formula:

Productivity Loss Cost = MTTR (in hours) × Hourly Rate (£)

Let’s say you assume a 3-hour productivity impact per ticket (based on a typical 2–4-hour SLA window). That gives:

3 hours × £19 ≈ £57 per ticket in lost productivity

On top of that, a straightforward service desk ticket tends to cost around £5–£30 in actual labour and overhead. So even a “cheap” £5 ticket really ends up being more like £57+ once you factor in downtime.

4. Why This Matters: Scaling Up the Numbers

Imagine you’ve got 1,000 users, each raising 1 ticket per month. Crunch the numbers:

  • 1,000 tickets/month
  • £57 (approx.) cost per ticket (productivity + direct service desk)
  • £57,000 in lost productivity every month

That’s almost £684,000 a year, and that’s before you even think about escalations, repeat incidents or unhappy users who might need extra hand-holding.

At that scale, investing in tools like ViadexOne’s integration with Nexthink collector employee monitoring like our partner, Nexthink; becomes a no-brainer. Shaving minutes off MTTR quickly turns into significant savings.

5. The Key Metrics to Keep an Eye On

If you really want to drive continuous improvement, track these metrics:

1. Tickets per Employee per Month

  • Typical benchmark: 1–1.5 tickets/user/month
  • Watch for spikes, if everyone’s suddenly raising VPN issues, you know where to dig in.
  • Look for repeatable patterns: if the same five issues pop up every week, automate or build a self-service fix (e.g. a password-reset portal or a simple script) to deflect those tickets before they reach the desk.

2. MTTR by Ticket Type

  • Break out simple, moderate and complex tickets.
  • Pinpoint if any category (e.g. hardware failures) is dragging the average up.
  • Use tools like Nexthink to proactively detect common problems and auto-remediate them. That way, your “moderate” bucket shrinks and MTTR for those tickets fall away.

3. % of Tickets Resolved at L1 vs. L2+

  • The higher your L1 “first-contact resolution” rate, the lower your overall spend.
  • If too many tickets go to L2 or beyond, it’s often a sign your knowledge base or runbooks need work.
  • Embed self-service options (chatbots, interactive automations) so users can fix basic issues themselves, like clearing a stuck print queue, without any support involvement.

4. User Satisfaction & Sentiment (CSAT) Scores

  • These usually go hand-in-hand with MTTR: faster fixes → happier users.
  • Run a quick survey after each ticket closes and chart the trend.
  • When an automated or self-service fix is developed, ask users if they found it easy; that feedback helps refine your automation catalogue.

5. Total Cost of Support

  • Direct service desk costs (labour, tools, licences)
  • Indirect productivity loss (MTTR × hourly rate)
  • Automation savings: track how many incidents never hit your queue because they were auto-remediated or self-resolved. For example, if a recurring ticket costs ~£70 and you auto-fix it 30 times a month, that’s ~£2,100 saved each month.
  • Combine them for a full picture of your annual spend and ROI.

If you pop these into a dashboard that your IT and Finance teams can review regularly, you’ll have a watertight case for investing in things that actually move the needle.

 6. Wrapping Up & Next Steps

Service desk optimisation isn’t just about counting tickets or headcount ratios. In 2025, the real ROI story is all about minimising MTTR, cut those hidden productivity costs. When you link every minute saved to a £19/hour employee rate, the savings become too big to ignore.

So, what should you do next?

  1. Audit your current MTTR for simple, moderate and complex tickets.
  2. Work out your true cost per ticket (direct spend + productivity loss).
  3. Spot quick wins – could more tickets be handled at L1, or automated?
  4. Consider proactive tooling – DEX, monitoring and automated remediation often pay for themselves in months, not years.

If you’d like a hand visualising this with something like a simple spreadsheet model or a dynamic calculator for internal reports or client slides, just let me know. I’m always happy to share templates or discuss how you can turn MTTR into your biggest ROI lever.