Password resets cost your IT team ~$85K/year. Enable self-service resets.

Anecdotally and through experiences, pretty much everybody in IT knows that password resets are the most common questions IT helpdesks receive on an everyday basis. So, self-service password resetting was one of the first use cases we picked for automating through Atom skills. More on how this works later in the post.

Before building this automation, we wanted to quantify the impact of having resets automated for two reasons:

• to substantiate to our own engineering teams why we thought it would be insanely useful to build this.
• to illustrate to potential customers the hidden cost of their IT team continuing to manually reset passwords - how much time this consumes and in turn, the cost that the organization is incurring because of all the grunt work.

We found some stats online, but there wasn’t much information on how people arrived at these numbers. Several times, numbers seemed to have been pulled out of thin air, without detailed substantiation.

We did two estimates to arrive at some grounded numbers for the cost of password resets: one a little conservative, and another, a little more liberal. We thought these estimates might be useful for anyone else who is trying to garner internal support within their IT organizations to spend on automating resolutions for password reset tickets.

For the purpose of our calculation, we considered a thousand-employee organization that handles at least one password reset ticket manually per year per employee. Here’s how the numbers look like, from an IT cost perspective:

Here’s how the numbers look like, from an employee-productivity loss perspective:

When you add up these numbers, it’s clear that businesses incur at least $42,500 worth of productivity losses as long as IT teams continue to resolve such reset tickets manually.

This cost can be much higher if we consider that some employees might forget their passwords more than once a year, or that some resets might take more than just 15 minutes.

For example, considering the volume of password reset tickets that IT receives, it isn’t really hard to imagine that an employee would raise at least two reset tickets a year.

If your employees are stranded for two hours while waiting for a reset, this is how much productivity is lost:

That brings the total cost to a whopping $85,000 (if employees raise two password reset tickets in a year). It makes total sense to set up automation for resolving such tickets without human intervention, and save as much.

We couldn’t have been more conservative with our estimates. Obviously, password resets don’t happen for just one tool within your enterprise - employees maybe requesting for resets for more than one tool through the course of a given year. The more tools you use, the more these costs go up and up 😊

Automating resolutions for password reset tickets with Atom

Atom, our AI assistant on Slack and Microsoft Teams, can now autonomously reset Microsoft Azure passwords for your users when your users are locked out of their Microsoft accounts.

Atomicwork administrators will have the choice to pick how they want to verify employee identity when their employees inform Atom that they’re locked out.

If you get a ton of these questions every month, schedule a demo with us and give your IT team the gift of time :)