IT help desk support: Boosting efficiency without hiring more staff

Whether or not they say it, somewhere in the finance team’s budget spreadsheet there’s a key assumption that has an outsized impact on IT. Specifically, team finance is expecting that the cost to provide help desk support to employee #200 is going to be a good bit cheaper than employee #100. In short, your finance team is expecting IT to become more efficient as the company grows.

So, while your first instinct when you come face-to-face with a surge in help desk tickets may be to go hire more people, that gets expensive fast. In fact, the average cost of a help desk call for something as simple as a password reset was $87 in 2024. Also, adding more people may not fit into your CFO’s spreadsheet. 

As companies grow, bending the IT help desk cost curve usually means taking a close look at repetitive tasks and processes. A lot of them probably made sense when you were smaller but with growth comes the need for an upgrade.

The good news? You don’t need to grow your team to improve efficiency of your IT help desk support. Over the last 5 years a whole new category of solutions has emerged to help. They use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) among other things to help automate help desk tasks. In some cases existing tool providers like GitHub are adding new features. In other cases vendors like Fixify are providing an end-to-end AI-assisted IT help desk solution that can automate tasks and take on over 75% of your end users’ help desk tickets so IT teams can focus on more value-added projects..

Let’s break it down.

IT help desks are overloaded: More staff isn’t the answer

There are several reasons why IT help desk support teams are coming under pressure from rising ticket volumes . According to the global consulting form McKinsey,  61% of customer care leaders reported an increase even as overall company growth stalled.

In our experience, it’s a bit of a perfect storm. In addition to the shift to hybrid and remote work the number of SaaS applications companies use is proliferating. The typical company we work with has 152 different SaaS apps which IT teams need support.

In the past, hiring more staff was a viable way to manage your way out of a ticket crunch. But increasingly hiring is a short-term solution that more often increases costs without solving the core problem. The result? Burnout, bottlenecks, and frustrated end users.

Over the last few years IT teams have been looking at how AI and automation can lighten the load. There’s no shortage of tools to look at. With the right tools in place, you can reduce help desk tickets, speed up ticket resolution times, and free your team to put that firehose away and focus on more strategic projects. 

Why traditional IT help desk support models break down

The old way of doing things simply doesn’t scale the same way it used to. This is especially pronounced for organizations as they grow from 50 employees onwards up to 1000 employees and beyond. Somewhere along that growth curve traditional IT help desk support models break down. 

The three most common reasons IT help desk processes falter is that the existing processes are too manual, reactive problem-solving doesn’t follow a written playbook, and/or tools that worked in the past start to buckle under larger ticket volumes.

Here’s how to tell when the cracks are showing:

• High ticket volumes: Traditional support models are rampant with repetitive requests. If password resets and access issues are dominating your queue this can overwhelm IT teams and drain your resources. 
• Rising costs: With simple tickets costing up to $100, help desk expenses become more and more visible as you grow. This causes people to ask “how can we do this more efficiently?” Usually the answer is to add new tech (vs. hiring more people).
• Slow resolution times: As the volume of password resets and access requests grows, IT pros’ time gets sucked away from more complex troubleshooting. Fixes get delayed. End users end up waiting and … ultimately grow frustrated as ticket resolution times spike. Meanwhile more strategic projects that could fix the underlying cause get kicked to “later.”
• Scalability challenges: What works for an older or smaller company doesn’t work for newer growing companies. Processes need to be upgraded along with the tech that they run on. If your ticket backlog is growing, that's a sign to re-think how you can work differently.

Bottom line? If you’re seeing any of the issues above it’s worth investigating a new approach. 

How to work more IT tickets without adding headcount

You can’t hire your way out of inefficiency. But you can automate, streamline, and scale up your IT help desk with the right mix of tools and tactics. Here are four of the most effective ways to upgrade your help desk without adding headcount.

1. AI that works tickets so your team doesn’t have to

While there’s still some debate about whether AI tools are ready for prime time (or whether the juice of implementing them is worth the squeeze yet) when deployed thoughtfully and paired with humans, AI and automation tools can be your secret weapon for ticket triage and resolution. In our experience, the key to using AI is to focus it on repetitive tasks that don’t require human judgment and processes that don’t change frequently.

Password resets and account lockouts are often some of the first processes that IT teams point their AI at. Fixify, for instance, can resolve 75% of Tier 1 and Tier 2 tickets. That translates into fewer repetitive tasks for your IT team and faster responses for your users.

2. Self-service portals that solve problems before they become tickets

Not every issue needs to land on your IT help desk. Self-service portals let users solve common problems on their own, reducing ticket volume and response times.

More than 80% of organizations offer some sort of self-service portal. They vary quite a bit in terms of sophistication. Start by building a user-friendly portal with clear, accessible knowledge base content. Then, you can spice it up with tools that use chatbots to make it feel conversational and intuitive. Just make sure your resources stay accurate and up to date to maintain trust and usefulness. Training is also key. Users need to know how they can use it to fix minor issues like resetting passwords. 

3. Smarter ticket routing for faster resolutions

Don’t let help desk tickets bounce around your team like a hot potato. As companies grow, it’s common for roles on the help desk to become more specialized — by app or use case. Manually rerouting tickets takes up time. A little automation can go a long way. Create rules — either manually or using AI automation — to categorize and route tickets based on complexity, urgency, and topic — so they land with the right person the first time.

You can even filter out low-priority alerts or system-generated noise. With a few smart configurations, you can eliminate a large chunk of these distractions and keep your team focused where it matters.

4. Data-driven IT support: Fix problems before they spiral

As companies grow, help desk data becomes more important and also harder to find. Tracking key help desk metrics like open requests, SLA compliance, ticket resolution time, and user sentiment helps identify patterns and ‘hot spots’ where your IT team spends the most time.

For example, Fixify delivers rich insights into SLA performance, user sentiment, and ticket trends. IT teams at our customers have used this data to make data-driven improvements and fix underlying problems before they spiral.

Fixify: Smarter IT help desk support, built for scale

If your current IT help desk support is slowing you down, solutions like Fixify can help you move faster — without overhauling your entire tech stack.

Here’s what makes us different:

• Cost-effective scaling: Fixify delivers 5x the efficiency at ¼ the cost of running an internal help desk. How? One way is by using AI automation and machine learning to streamline operations. But we also keep our own human analysts in the loop (see next bullet). Plus, our pricing is simple. It’s based on the number of full-time employees in your organization so it’s easy to predict and manage the costs
• Human + AI approach: We believe that AI works best when paired with human expertise. That’s why we keep humans in the loop. Our AI automation helps our own analysts triage and investigate issues faster so they can spend time focused on communicating with your end users. 
• Plug-and-play integration: You choose your tech and we plug into it. Fixify connects easily with tools like Jira, Zendesk, ServiceNow, and identity management solutions like Okta. The net result is that you get a unified support process with a whole lot more visibility into what’s going on.

By analyzing your environment, Fixify identifies what’s bogging down your help desk and provides data-driven recommendations for improvement — no guesswork, no disruption. 

The most effective IT teams aren’t hiring more: They’re automating

Rising ticket volumes and tight budgets aren’t going anywhere — but that doesn’t mean you have to burn out your team or blow your budget.

The most effective organizations today aren’t hiring more staff. They’re embracing smarter support with AI and automation. They’re empowering their end users, streamlining resolution processes, and using real-time insights to improve performance.

Investing in an IT help desk solution like Fixify can give you everything you need to modernize your IT help desk support — from automated workflows to intelligent analytics and seamless integrations. So before you hire, take a look at what’s really driving those tickets… and see how Fixify can help you handle them faster, better, and at a fraction of the cost.

Ready to scale without hiring? Let’s talk about how Fixify can transform your help desk.