Ticket Merger

What Duplicate Tickets Actually Cost You

Four numbers you already know, and a total that usually surprises the person who asked for it.

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What duplicate tickets cost you

Duplicate tickets per month
1,200
Agent hours lost per year
960
Wasted every year
$26,880

This only counts the handling time. It leaves out the customer getting two different answers, the skewed ticket volume in your reporting, and the CSAT hit when someone gets chased twice.

Stop paying for duplicates

How to fill it in honestly

  • Tickets per month. Take it from your helpdesk reporting, not from memory.
  • Duplicate rate. If you do not know it, use 12%. Support queues typically run between 8% and 20%, and teams consistently guess low.
  • Time wasted per duplicate. Not just the merge. Count reading it, searching for the original, deciding they match, merging, and re-checking the customer got one coherent answer. Four minutes is conservative.
  • Fully loaded agent cost. Salary plus benefits, tax, equipment and management time, divided by productive hours. Usually 25% to 40% above the raw hourly rate.

    • What the number leaves out

    The figure above only counts handling time, which is the part you can defend in a budget meeting. It ignores three costs that are real and harder to price.

  • The customer experience. Two agents, two answers, one confused customer. That is a CSAT hit on an interaction that should never have existed.
  • The reporting distortion. Duplicates inflate volume, which inflates your cost per ticket and hides your true first-contact resolution rate.
  • The hidden SLA breaches. When two tickets cover one problem, one of them gets answered and the other ages quietly until it breaches.

    • Frequently asked questions

    What is a normal duplicate ticket rate?+

    Most support queues sit between 8% and 20%. Multi-channel teams, especially those running both email and a web form, are usually at the higher end.

    How do I find my real duplicate rate?+

    Manually, sample 200 tickets from one week and count the pairs. Automatically, connect Ticket Merger and the first scan of your open queue reports it.

    Is four minutes per duplicate realistic?+

    It is the conservative end. Teams that measure it properly usually land between four and nine minutes once searching and re-checking are counted.

    See your real number, not an estimate

    Connect your helpdesk and the first scan reports your actual duplicate rate against your actual queue.

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