Report Finds Less than Half of Financial Services Support Centers Meet First Call Resolution Targets

Bomgar Releases First Ever Help Desk Benchmarks for Financial Services Sector

RIDGELAND, Miss. – The HDI Benchmark Report for Financial Services—released today by Bomgar Corporation, the worldwide leader in secure, appliance-based remote support—reports  that only 46 percent of financial services support centers met their average target first call resolution (FCR) rate of 74.7 percent in 2009.  In addition, 62 percent of financial services support centers experienced an increase in incident volume, challenging support organizations to meet growing demand with limited budget and resources.

Each year, HDI, a global association for IT service and technical support professionals and the premier certification body for the industry, publishes the Practices and Salary Survey to provide organizations with benchmarks against which to measure their support center’s performance.  For the first time, this new supplemental white paper offers benchmark data specific to the financial services sector. The findings for 2009 suggest that financial services support centers are running at or above average across all industries, and yet still fail to meet the expectations of their industry. In addition, while financial services has traditionally been a relatively early adopter of new technologies, support centers in the industry show only average adoption of more progressive means of providing support.

According to the Magic Quadrant for the IT Service Desk by Gartner, Inc., October 16, 2009, “During the past decade, there has been a continuous stream of technology innovations, such as virtualization, Web 2.0, cloud computing and so on, appearing in the IT portfolio each year.”  David Coyle, research VP, and Bill Malik, research director, at Gartner, Inc. also state in The Research Roundup: 2010 Service Desk Best Practices Guide, June 18, 2010, “The service desk is no longer just a trouble-ticketing mechanism or a problem-reporting station, but is the governance hub for service and support delivery to the organization.”

“Support is the lens through which all of IT is viewed.  If the support experience doesn’t meet an employee’s or customer’s expectations, it can mar their impression of the entire IT organization,” said Nathan McNeill, founder and VP of product strategy at Bomgar.  “While support measurements are generally higher in the financial services industry, so are expectations.  To remain competitive, CIOs need to benchmark their organization against their direct peers versus the IT support industry as a whole.”

Other key findings in the whitepaper include:

• A decided majority of financial services support centers hit their target rates for Average Speed to Answer (72 percent) and Abandonment (60 percent). These rates are well above the all-industry average.
• The vast majority of financial services support centers (84 percent) have established email as a support channel, but nearly a third reported 70 percent or more email incidents escalating to the phone before being resolved.
• While 39 percent of respondents in financial services considered online chat an essential component of an effective support center, 75 percent were NOT using online chat.
• Averages across all industries suggest that median per-incident cost with chat are almost half that of phone incidents and one-third less expensive than email incidents.

The report is an invaluable tool for financial services support managers to assess how they stack up to others in the financial services industry and optimize their organization’s capabilities.  To download the full report, please visit: http://www.bomgar.com/lp/whitepaper/financial/index-pr.aspx.

Bomgar is the worldwide leader in secure, appliance-based remote support. The company’s award winning solutions enable organizations to improve IT support efficiency by securely accessing and managing virtually any system – Mac, Linux, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile smartphones plus all versions of Windows. Over 5,000 leading companies around the world have deployed Bomgar’s enterprise-class solutions to transform their IT support functions and significantly improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction while dramatically reducing costs. Bomgar is a privately-held company headquartered in Ridgeland, Mississippi with offices in Atlanta, San Francisco, Washington DC, Paris and London. In 2009, Bomgar was named one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the US by Inc. Magazine.

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