They paid for unlimited support. A third of the tickets show nobody did any work.

Situation

A professional services firm had outsourced IT to the same managed services provider for years. Staff complained constantly about crashes, frozen sessions, and lost work, and leadership had no way to tell whether that was normal friction or something they were being badly served on. The provider held the ticket data, the invoices arrived monthly, and nobody had ever put the two side by side.

That is the ordinary position a firm is in with any managed vendor. You are paying for something you cannot see, and the party who can see it is the party being paid.

Intervention

We asked for the raw ticket export and audited it against the invoices. Three years of history, every ticket, matched to what the firm had actually paid over the same period.

The pattern came apart quickly. Roughly a third of all completed tickets were closed with zero hours logged. Roughly a third had no technician assigned at all. About a third of the entire queue was automated alerts firing repeatedly for the same conditions, opened and closed over and over without the underlying fault ever being fixed. Onboarding tickets sat open more than a year and a half after the employee started.

Against that, the contract was billing a flat monthly fee for unlimited service desk support, and the firm was carrying a six-figure annual spend for it.

We also priced the other side of the ledger, which nobody had done: the staff hours lost to documented incidents, at the firm's own billing rate. Documented incidents alone, before accounting for the ones nobody bothered to report, ran into six figures over the period reviewed.

Outcome

The firm moved to a new provider, which was already underway by the time the audit concluded, and had a quantified record of what the prior arrangement had cost. The findings went to their counsel to evaluate options for recovery.

We did not need access to the vendor's systems or their cooperation. Everything above came out of a data export the client was entitled to and had never asked for. If you are paying a managed provider, the ticket history is yours. Reading it is the cheapest audit available to you.