--- title: "Why IT and HR support costs more than anyone measures" description: "IT and HR explain how to request access or how many days off are left twenty times over, with no ticket recording it. Why that time shows up in no report." url: https://studiochat.io/blog/soporte-interno-nadie-mide locale: en translations: { es: https://studiochat.io/es/blog/soporte-interno-nadie-mide.md, pt: https://studiochat.io/pt/blog/soporte-interno-nadie-mide.md } site: https://studiochat.io --- [ Back to blog](/blog) The highest-paid person on the IT team spent forty minutes this week explaining how to set up the VPN. Four times, to four different people, through four different channels. Not one of the four was written down anywhere, so the fifth person will ask her too. That's support, and it's the most expensive support the company pays for. It's delivered by the people with the least time to spare, on the same five or six things (a new access, the VPN, how many days off are left, the deadline for filing a reimbursement) and none of it leaves a record. Put another way: the company already has an internal help desk. It's a WhatsApp group. Nobody chose it, it has no owner, no priorities and no paper trail. One week of employee requests, two versions of it What the report seesWhat actually happened 0 Tickets opened \- Resolution time Repeated questions No activity recorded this month None of the questions that did happen went through a system, so none of them exist for the report. The number isn't miscalculated: it was never generated. The monthly IT and HR report: zero tickets, zero resolution time, zero repeated questions. A flawless month. ## [Why doesn't this show up in any report?](#why-doesnt-this-show-up-in-any-report) Because it never goes through a system built for it. Customer support has a platform, SLAs and reports; the support that happens inside runs on the team chat and the inbox of the person who "knows about that". There's no ticket to open and no closure to count, so at the end of the month there's nothing to add up. And it arrives that way because the other option doesn't exist: the answer is in someone's head, or in a document nobody can find. 47% of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to do their job (Gartner · survey of nearly 4,900 office employees) Asking that person isn't laziness: it's the shortest path there is. The problem is that the path has a fixed width, and the width is one person. ## [What does it cost?](#what-does-it-cost) It comes down to two numbers almost nobody has written down and that anyone can estimate in thirty seconds: how many repeated requests arrive per week, and how long one takes to answer counting the cost of dropping whatever was in progress. Put your own numbers in Repeated questions per week: 40 Minutes each one takes: 9 Hours a month answering the same thing 26 Full 8-hour workdays 3.2 Count the minutes of whoever answers, not of whoever asks. This is your estimate, not our data: it's for seeing the order of magnitude before deciding whether it's worth measuring properly. With conservative values it lands between two and four full workdays a month. It shows up in no budget because it isn't invoiced and isn't approved: it's deducted from the work that person was hired to do. ## [Why does the urgent thing wait behind the trivial ones?](#why-does-the-urgent-thing-wait-behind-the-trivial-ones) Because a WhatsApp group has exactly one scheduling rule: the order things arrived in. The request that could wait three days and the outage that left Sales unable to work come in through the same door, with nothing marking them apart. A Monday morning in the IT group chat Arrival orderBy priority * 1 How do I request CRM access for someone starting Monday? Sales team routine 0 min * 2 How many days off do I have left this year? Design routine 6 min * 3 Which VPN do I use to get in from home? Someone who just joined routine 15 min * 4 Can you resend me the onboarding link? HR routine 27 min * 5 Until when can I file last month's reimbursement? Operations routine 32 min * 6 The shipping label won't print Warehouse routine 40 min * 7 The whole sales team just lost access to the system Sales team urgent 55 min The access outage came in seventh, so it waits 55 minutes behind six questions that could have waited three days. Illustrative. The minutes are the answerer's. Nobody ignores an access outage on purpose: the problem is that in an informal channel the urgency only becomes visible once someone scrolls down to it, and to do that they have to have finished everything above. The most expensive cost isn't the first six: it's the hour the seventh spent waiting its turn. ## [Is adding more people to the IT or HR team enough?](#is-adding-more-people-to-the-it-or-hr-team-enough) No, because the problem isn't how many people there are: it's where the answer lives. And while it lives in one person's head, the company has a single point of failure that appears in no risk register: the day that person takes two weeks off, nobody new gets into the system. > As long as the answer lives in a person, hiring another one doesn't remove the bottleneck: it duplicates it. What does change the pattern is making the answer stop depending on anyone in particular: an agent trained on the team's real policies, with the same [narrow permissions and human oversight any AI agent in production needs](/blog/prompt-no-es-seguridad), answering repeated requests through the channel each employee already uses and handing off to a person when the case calls for it. It's the same mechanism already running in customer support (at Takenos it resolves 70% of enquiries autonomously, in roughly a minute per case) applied inside the company. --- Before adding anyone to the team, it's worth measuring something simpler: how many times a week the same request comes up, and how much real time it takes from whoever answers it today. That figure exists in no report, and that's the first clue. How to measure it this week You don't need a platform. For five days, every time someone in IT or HR answers an internal request, have them write one line: what was asked and where it came from. By Friday, whatever shows up more than once is the complete list of what is currently in no report at all. To see how this is built for processes that aren't customer-facing: [Other StudioChat solutions](/other-solutions). **Sources:** * Gartner: [Digital Worker Experience survey](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-05-10-gartner-survey-reveals-47-percent-of-digital-workers-struggle-to-find-the-information-needed-to-effectively-perform-their-jobs) (conducted 2022, released May 2023): "47% of digital workers struggle to find information or data needed". Frequently asked questions ### Do you need a proper ticketing system in place to measure this? No. It's enough to count by hand for a week how many times the same request comes up (an access, the VPN, days off remaining) and through how many different channels. That alone shows whether there's a problem, before investing in any platform. ### Does this replace the IT or HR person who answers these questions today? No. It takes over the repeated, low-risk requests so that person stops answering the same thing all day and is free for the work that actually needs their judgment: the agent hands off to someone on the team as soon as the case calls for it. ### How does the agent know which internal information it can share without exposing data it shouldn't? It's trained on the policies and documents the company decides to share, with the same role-based permissions that already exist for any internal system: it has no access to anything it wasn't explicitly given. ### Does this only apply to large companies with many employees? It applies before that: the smaller the IT or HR team, the more expensive it is, in relative terms, for two or three people to absorb every repeated request from the rest of the company. 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