A forgotten password feels like a small problem. It’s not a server failure, it’s not a security incident and nobody calls an emergency meeting over it. But for the employee staring at a locked screen, work has stopped completely. No email, no shared files, no Microsoft 365, no line-of-business applications. Until access is restored, that person is paid to wait.
Around DFW, we’ve found that most leadership teams have never actually looked at what password resets cost their organization. It’s one of those operational issues that hides in plain sight because each individual incident seems too minor to measure. Added up across a year and a whole workforce, the picture looks different.
The Hidden Cost of Password Resets
Password resets are not a rare event. HDI research found they account for about three out of every ten support center tickets, and more than a third of support centers reported that over 30 percent of their tickets were password related. That’s a significant slice of your support capacity going to one repetitive task.
The dollar figures are worth a look too. Forbes reported that Forrester researchers found the typical cost of a single password reset runs around $70, and that large enterprises can allocate more than $1 million annually to password-related support. Your organization is probably not spending seven figures on resets. But the underlying point holds at any size: the cost isn’t just help desk labor. It’s the employee sitting idle, the interrupted workday and the delay to whatever task depended on that access. A locked account at 9 a.m. on invoice day is not a $70 problem.
Productivity Loss Adds Up
Yubico research conducted by the Ponemon Institute found that respondents spent an average of 12.6 minutes per week entering or resetting passwords. That works out to roughly 10.9 hours per employee per year. For the average company size in that study, the estimated productivity cost was $5.2 million annually.
Twelve minutes a week sounds trivial. Across 50 or 100 employees, it’s hundreds of hours a year spent on nothing but getting into the tools people need to do their jobs. Leadership rarely sees this number because it never shows up as a line item. It shows up as friction, and friction is easy to ignore until you total it up.
Why Traditional Password Reset Support Creates Friction
When an employee has to contact support for a reset, two people stop working instead of one. The employee waits. The support technician sets aside whatever they were doing to verify the caller, process the reset and confirm the employee is back in. Industry research cited by BleepingComputer suggests resets make up anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of help desk calls, with each one taking roughly 2 to 30 minutes to resolve.
None of this is anyone’s fault. When self-service isn’t available, human involvement is the only responsible option. But it means your support resources are repeatedly pulled away from higher-priority work like resolving real technical issues, improving systems and preventing the next problem. Every reset handled manually is time that doesn’t go toward something more valuable.
The Better Model: Secure Self-Service Password Reset
There’s a more efficient path, and it’s mature technology at this point. Microsoft describes it plainly: self-service password reset gives users the ability to change or reset their password with no administrator or help desk involvement. If an account gets locked or a password is forgotten, the user follows a few prompts to unblock themselves and get back to work. Fewer help desk calls, less lost productivity.
The employee experience improves too. Nobody enjoys opening a ticket and waiting for a callback just to get into their own email. Letting people safely help themselves is a small but real quality-of-work improvement.
How Fulcrum Helps
Our approach keeps the process simple for the employee and disciplined for the organization. Users register once with CyberQP, verifying their phone number with a temporary text code. From that point on, when a reset is needed, they visit the Fulcrum Support Center, open the Password Reset section and select the Access Password Reset Tool. They enter their work email, verify their identity with a temporary code, create a new password that meets their organization’s password policy and log back in.
That’s it. No ticket, no waiting on a callback, no pulling a technician off other work. The employee gets back to their day faster, and our support team stays focused on the more complex issues that actually need experienced hands.
Security Is Still Essential
Speed should never come at the cost of security, and this is where a lot of reset processes fall short. Password resets are a favorite target for social engineering. Attackers have learned that impersonating an employee and asking the help desk for a reset is often easier than breaking in any other way.
That’s why identity verification sits at the center of our process. CyberQP functions as both a productivity tool and a security control, verifying identity before any system access is granted or password reset is performed. Employees move faster, and the organization gets a consistent, verified process instead of relying on whether a busy technician recognizes a voice on the phone.
The Executive Takeaway
Password resets aren’t just an IT inconvenience. They’re a productivity issue, a support efficiency issue and a security issue rolled into one recurring interruption. A secure self-service password reset process gives employees a faster path back to work, keeps support focused on higher-value problems and closes a door that attackers love to knock on.
If your employees still have to open a support ticket every time they forget a password, it may be time to review whether a secure self-service password reset process could save time, reduce support friction and improve day-to-day productivity.
Sources
– HDI, Password-Reset Practices in Support (https://www.thinkhdi.com/library/supportworld/2011/password-reset-practices)
– BleepingComputer, Password Reset Calls Are Costing Your Org Big Money (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/password-reset-calls-are-costing-your-org-big-money/)
– Forbes, Embracing The End Of The Password Here And Now (https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2023/03/23/embracing-the-end-of-the-password-here-and-now/)
– Intelligent CISO, Yubico research reveals 69% of employees share passwords with colleagues (https://www.intelligentciso.com/2019/01/29/yubico-research-reveals-69-of-employees-share-passwords-with-colleagues/)
– Microsoft Learn, Self-service password reset deep dive (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/authentication/concept-sspr-howitworks)
