Fixify benchmark report: How does your IT help desk measure up?

Ever feel like you’re whitewater rafting down a fast-moving IT river, navigating obstacles and just hoping not to get swamped? Or maybe your IT operations are mostly smooth sailing, but you’re wondering what else you could accomplish if you built in a bit more efficiency and got more in tune with your end users—so you could make them even happier. 

No matter where your IT help desk is now, it’s always helpful to look around and see how you compare to other organizations in a similar boat. That’s why we put together the 2024 Fixify IT Help Desk Benchmark Report. 

Our report, based on IT help desk ticket data submitted across companies ranging from 250-800 people, is a deep dive into the ways IT teams spend their resources and time. It’s filled with recommendations, including optimal staffing ratios, thoughtful ways to add efficiency and scale, and insights on how to help end users feel cared for, not handled.

Here are three important insights from the report:

• Software and application tickets are the most common, and that’s part of a bigger trend in IT right now. Almost 50% of all IT help desk tickets (46%, to be exact) are related to software and apps, so resolving them fast is critical to getting end users unstuck and back to work quickly. And if you’re feeling like these particular obstacles are coming faster and more furious than ever, you’re not alone. The high demand for software and app support aligns with other big trends across IT, including more remote work and the huge number of apps IT teams manage these days. Our study found that, on average, organizations are overseeing a staggering 152 apps! Talk about herding digital ducks.
  
  
• IT staffing ratios can vary, but there’s a sweet spot. While IT-to-employee ratios tend to vary a lot among companies with fewer than 200 employees, by 500 employees, the ratio stabilizes. We’ve found that the ideal balance is right around one IT employee for every 100 end users for IT teams to keep their heads above water.
  
  
• There are still a lot of opportunities to optimize—and help make end users happy—with automation. All of the IT leaders we’ve talked to are deeply concerned about taking care of their people, and that can make the decision about when to automate—and when to do things by hand—a tricky one. But if we look at the data, we can see that fewer than 7% of tickets (6.94%) use automation to speed up resolution time. By choosing some of the most repetitive tasks for automation, IT teams have a huge opportunity to get end users back on track even more quickly, and free up more time to focus on building connections and tackling the more complicated (and interesting) problems. 

Want to know how your help desk stacks up—and get recommendations for smoother sailing through it all? Check out the full report here.