Are password resets draining your IT department?

How much time does your IT department spend on password resets? At first sight, password resets may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of IT service desk responsibilities. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The high cost of password resets: impact on IT service desk efficiency and budget

According to Gartner, between 30% and 50% of all IT service desk calls are for password resets. Depending on the size of your organization and the number of end-users, this can take tens of hours per week. In some cases, this means IT service desk employees spend almost 40% of their workday handling password resets.

But handling password resets isn’t only extremely time-consuming: it doesn’t come cheap either. The Burton Group estimates that password management can cost up to $250 per user, per year. For a mid-sized organization of 500 end-users, that boils down to $125,000 per year.

Impact on the organization

Password resets being extremely costly is not all there is to it. With IT departments spending most of their time on password resets and other recurring tasks, they don’t have any time to invest in high-value strategic projects such as modernization or problem management.

But it’s not just IT that suffers from password resets. As end-users wait for their password to be reset, their work is put on hold – negatively impacting not only their productivity and the organization as a whole, but the organization’s customers, too.

Automating password resets can decrease service desk calls by more than 40% and reduce end-user down-time.

Automation is the way to go

The answer to the headache of password resets is automation. Whether it is done with a chatbot or via an automated workflow within a self-service portal, automating password resets can decrease service desk calls by more than 40% and reduce end-user down-time – which quickly adds up to significant cost savings.

Automation also allows IT service desk employees to handle more complex calls and invest in larger improvements, ultimately improving job satisfaction, efficiency, and productivity. This, in turn, leads to happier end-users. A win-win!

But don’t take our word for it. A Forrester research states that employees who work with automation have experienced a 69% improvement in their job satisfaction, while 78% of business leaders confirm that automating tasks in the organization increases productivity for everyone involved.

And our customer, the District School Board of Niagara, found automation helped them save valuable time and money. As did the University of Ottawa: Since implementing its ITSM software solution, uOttawa has been able to clear more than 45,000 (and counting) service desk tickets without the need for help desk intervention or triage service requests.

Embrace service desk automation today

Ready to automate those pesky password resets away? Read up on the what, why and how of service desk automation.