PAPERCUT
How to eliminate a third of your helpdesk tickets For many businesses, everyday print issues can be major causes of lost time and revenue, but there is a solution to this – automated print deployment, as Matthew Lee, product marketing manager at PaperCut, explains.
For many organisations, print issues are a major time sink. Studies suggest that between one in four and one in two IT help desk tickets are related to printing, from missing print queues to driver errors. This is a significant slice of IT capacity – in an area that doesn’t really add strategic value to the business. Print is often described as the ‘silent drain’ on IT resources. To put things into perspective, let’s say a medium-sized IT helpdesk has two staff members who each take about 30 calls a day. Say that one-third of these are related to printing: that’s roughly 20 calls. Some of these might be easy to solve over the phone, like paper jams or toner shortages. But for more complex problems, such as connectivity issues or hardware malfunctions, the IT team may need to make a physical inspection of the printer or spend time at someone’s desk. But what is the cost of those print- related tickets? Take those 20 calls multiplied by an average cost of £17
per ticket multiplied by 250 working days across the year. That adds up to at least £85,000 – not to mention the time wasted on lost productivity. Interested in cutting that cost out? Read on.
Common print-related helpdesk problems
Let’s start by looking at where the bulk of print tickets come from. In my experience, print drivers are responsible for many common issues. When new devices are added or operating systems are updated, drivers often become mismatched or outdated, resulting in users losing colour options, print jobs failing and printers vanishing from the list of options. Print queues are another frequent source of user frustration. The classic culprit is a print job getting stuck in a shared queue and blocking everyone else from printing. There are also a lot of basic setup challenges, such as calls to IT about how to add a printer. When users are non-technical or working remotely, even simple tasks can become complicated. Connectivity and access issues
Matthew Lee
papercut.com
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Print queues are another frequent source of user frustration. The
classic culprit is a print job
getting stuck in a shared queue and blocking everyone else from printing.
can also require IT support. When printers are installed manually, IT teams have to connect each individual user to the print server. In a hybrid working environment,
”
users could have trouble connecting remotely or might be trying to print to
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