A lot of software licenses are not used and become "Shelfware" because the needs of the purchaser changed or the software never delivered what the purchaser expected.  Often, the purchaser thinks that they know what they need as far as feature requirements, but after implementation they can not get their employees or customers engaged to use the application.  Also, in time their needs change and the product the bought has not evolved to meet their changing needs.

In summary, there is a lot of risk in purchasing software. Consider if the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model may help your organization minimize risk and decrease the lifetime TCO of an application.

Request a Free Needs Assessment your Help Desk or Customer Service Software Requirements

Giva provides some valuable tools to help you better understand the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of owning software applications and comparing it to the SaaS approach.

The purchase price of software licenses and annual maintenance fees you pay a vendor are a very small component of the true TCO.

Hardware, databases and related purchases are important to consider, but they are not as large as the actual labor required to manage and maintain the application and the infrastructure. Gartner Group estimates some of these costs and Giva will provide them to you in an Excel spreadsheet if you request a TCO analysis.

Labor is an enormous component that is always over looked and universally underestimated due to human bias. It's often hard for IT people to admit that an outside vendor can do a better job and be more cost effective. The fact is that SaaS vendors have enormous scale and efficiencies of building, managing, maintaining and hosting an application for 100,000s of users vs. your company trying to do the same for your IT department which is of course many many orders of magnitude smaller.

When your CIO says, "we have plenty of IT people to do all this work", respond by saying, "Let's look at your list of IT projects for the last 12 month...are you ahead or behind schedule?" Invariably, you will find that they are significantly behind schedule on many key revenue impact projects because the IT dept is spending a lot of time just to keep the infrastructure up and running instead of focusing on strategic projects that impact/generate revenue to the company.  As you well know, a help desk/customer service organization does not generate revenue for a company.

Request a Free TCO Comparing Your Help Desk or Customer Service Software vs. Giva

Giva SaaS eliminates IT help desk upgrades & software maintenance

Giva has a special industry focus on healthcare and hospitals.

You have a clear mandate to reduce IT help desk operating costs. Is the cost of annual software maintenance, consultants and upgrade fees for your current IT help desk application too high?

With Giva, healthcare and hospital customers on average experienced a:

• 45% decrease in annual maintenance cost (Giva annual subscription cost was 45% less than previous annual software maintenance)
• 90% decrease in implementation time and cost
• Eliminated all servers, software and upgrade costs
• Decreased headcount required to maintain service desk application

Click for a TCO or ROI Analysis

Click to watch a 2 minute video of Giva eHelpDesk

Eliminate Service Desk Express upgrades & software maintenance with Giva SaaS

Is the cost of annual software maintenance, consultants and upgrade fees for BMC Service Desk Express too high?

BMC Service Desk Express Suite customers face a resource-intensive and expensive proposition to continue to maintain their service desk application.

With Giva, BMC Service Desk Express customers on average experienced a:

• 45% decrease in annual maintenance cost (Giva annual subscription cost was  45% less than BMC annual maintenance)
• 90% decrease in implementation time and cost
• Eliminated all servers, software and upgrade costs
• Decreased headcount required to maintain service desk application

Click for a TCO or ROI Analysis

Click to watch a video of Giva eHelpDesk

Here are the Last Few Reasons You Should Purchase a Help Desk/Customer Service Software Package.

Of course, with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) can save you a lot of money and SaaS vendors can get you up and running faster than deploying software on your own infrastructure. Our main point is that building your own help desk or customer service application really makes little economic sense. There are many products that are commercially available. Surely, there are a number of products that can meet your needs. We see many companies live to regret trying to build and maintain a product on their own.

Reason Four: You will have access to patches, updates, user groups, updated documentation, and technical support when the product is released and when you need it.

Reason Three: No matter how good the training, and no matter how great the documentation, sooner or later you will need to call the vendor’s technical support. This need usually arises at the worst possible time and inevitably involves a customer. Developers are busy people and you have to ask yourself if the in-house developers will be available when you need them. Most vendors have help desks that are open 24/7 and are literally waiting for your call.

Reason Two: Updates. A purchased product is continually updated, debugged and readied for your immediate use. With an in-house product your staff will usually be debugging the update after it is installed. This is not fair to your staff, your customers, or your boss.

Reason One: You can purchase, train on and implement a purchased product in a fraction of the time it takes to design, code, document, train on and implement an in-house product. A software development project can easily take on a life of its own and by developing an in-house product you are competing with paying customers. Unless you work for one of those unique companies mentioned earlier and unless your help desk can command the resources it needs, when it needs them, the chances are that in-house development will be prohibitively costly, time consuming, frustrating to train on and difficult to implement.

See our white papers at https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/

Here are the next few reasons to buy a help desk or customer service application vs. building your own:

Reason Seven: Help desk software packages can be easily customized to meet your support operation’s unique needs. You won’t get this capability in an in-house product without a great deal of extra work and time.

Reason Six: The product you purchase will have voluminous documentation that is both technical and end-user oriented. It may even have CBT disks available and will certainly have on-site as well as off-site training programs available to train your staff. An in-house product will rarely have such documentation.

Reason Five: The documentation and training will be at least three times better with a purchased product than it will be with an in-house product. You will not have to compete with the internal documentation and training staff that get paid to serve paying customers.

See our white papers at https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/

In a poor economy, we get this question a lot. What should I do, build or buy a help desk or customer service application?

What Do You Get With A Purchased Product?
The short answer is, a lot. Help desk software vendors spend millions of dollars and months of effort in determining what features go into their products. In addition, their sales, marketing, and technical support staffs have an intimate knowledge of help desk operations, trends, and requirements.

Here are the Top Ten Reasons You Should Purchase a Help Desk Software Package:

Reason Ten: The product already exists and you won’t have to spend time, money and political capital negotiating with a development executive to liberate already scarce resources.

Reason Nine: The vendor you choose has an understanding of how help desks work and what they need in a software package. Developers don’t always have this understanding and explaining it to them can take time, and time is money.

Reason Eight: Almost every help desk software package in the world can be purchased in modules. You can add and delete modules based upon your business needs and budget.

See our white papers at https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/

BMC Remedy Cost Relief

Eliminate Remedy upgrades & software maintenance with Giva SaaS 

Is the very high cost of BMC Remedy Action Request System (ARS) consulting, upgrades and software maintenance not in your IT budget?

BMC Remedy customers face a resource-intensive complex re-implementation to upgrade to version 7.x. Remedy 7 is a code "rewrite" and requires a complete re-implementation and customization. 

With Giva, Remedy customers on average experienced a:

• 45% decrease in annual maintenance cost (Giva annual subscription cost was 45% less than Remedy annual maintenance)
• 90% decrease in implementation time and cost
• Eliminated all servers, software and upgrade costs
• Decreased headcount required to maintain service desk application

Get a quote from your BMC Remedy consultant and then contact Giva.

Giva will prepare a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Analysis and a Return-On-Investment Analysis (ROI) detailing how much money and headcount your company will save over the next 3 years.

See the following link for details and watch the 2 minute video on Giva's new Dashboard.

https://www.givainc.com/customers/compare/bmc-remedyforce-alternative-replacement-reviews-ratings/

Here are some metrics to measure your help desk and customer service operation by:

What kind of help desk or customer support organization are you running? As you can see the cost per call is significantly different. This will impact the Return on Investment (ROI) of your help desk or customer support organization. Of course, the strategic stage help desk has the highest customer service and the highest first call resolution rate.  Customers also call the help desk or customer service organization less often as the strategic organization has taken many proactive steps to reduce call volume by addressing the root cause of calls to the help desk or customer service organization.

Reprinted from CIO Magazine

Here are two great White Papers on the topic:

https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/customer-service-best-practices-features-functions-customer-service-software/

https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/help-desk-best-practices-features-functions-help-desk-software/