Your newest market will generate more IT tickets per person than anywhere else in the company, often by a factor of three or four. This is normal, it is temporary if you handle it, and it is permanent if you do not.
TL;DR
- Ticket volume in a new market scales with the number of unanswered firsts, not with headcount.
- Four people in a new country can out-ticket sixty in an established one, because they hit the same set of firsts.
- The spike is mostly logistics and access, not product. Shipping, provisioning and local service gaps dominate.
- Track tickets per head against the company average monthly. It should start high and fall.
- A ratio that stops falling is a content gap, not a difficult market.
- Most of it is preventable with about twelve documents written before the first start date.
Why volume does not follow headcount
An established market has answered its firsts. Somebody has already found out which courier works, how long customs takes, which local provider supplies the SIM cards, and what happens when a machine needs a part that is not stocked in the region. Those answers exist, formally or in somebody’s memory.
A new market has to discover all of it again, and the number of discoveries is roughly fixed regardless of how many people are there. Four starters will encounter the same unknown courier, the same customs process and the same missing local provider as forty would.
Which means the per-head figure is high precisely because the population is small. This catches people out, because the planning instinct is to scale support effort with headcount and the fixed cost of a market is nearly independent of it.
What the tickets are actually about
Logistics first. Where is my laptop, why is it held, who pays the charge, what do I do with the packaging. Shipping and customs questions arrive at the IT desk because the device is an IT asset, even though nobody on the desk controls the courier.
Provisioning second. Accounts and licences that exist for other markets and were never configured for this one. Regional software restrictions. A tool that works everywhere except the country you just opened.
Local service gaps third. Warranty cover that does not extend to the country, a repair partner with no local presence, a replacement that has to cross a border. These are the slowest to resolve and the ones most likely to recur.
Language sits across all three, amplifying rather than causing. A logistics question is harder to ask and harder to answer when neither party is working in their first language.
A worked example
A company of 390 opened in a new country with five people. Company average was 1.9 IT tickets per person per quarter. The new market filed 38 tickets in its first quarter, which is 7.6 per head, four times the average.
Sorted by topic, 14 were about a shipment held in customs, 9 were provisioning for a payroll tool not configured for that country, 7 were about a software licence restricted in the region, and 8 were ordinary. Three root causes produced 30 of the 38 tickets, and all three were knowable before anybody started.
By quarter three the market was at 2.4 per head and falling. Nothing changed about the market. Somebody wrote down the customs process, got the payroll tool configured, and documented the licence restriction with a workaround.
What to write before the first start date
What to do:
- Document the shipping route for this market: courier, typical transit time, who is importer of record, what happens if it is held.
- List every tool in your stack and confirm each is configured and available in the new country.
- Check warranty and repair coverage for the device model in that country, before shipping it.
- Write the local setup notes: keyboard layout, regional defaults, any local provider steps.
- Name a contact and a response time, expressed in the new market’s working hours.
- Set up tickets per head by market as a monthly figure so you can see the curve.
The tool audit is the highest-return item and the one most often skipped, because it is dull and it requires asking other teams. It also prevents the single largest category of avoidable tickets.
Reading the curve
Measure monthly rather than quarterly, since the whole interesting period is about one quarter long. Expect three to five times the company average in month one.
A falling ratio means the answers are being captured. A flat ratio at month four means they are not, and the same questions are recurring from each new person. That is a content backlog rather than a difficult market, and the list of repeated topics is your work queue.
A ratio that falls to well below the company average is the one to be suspicious of. In a market of five people that usually means they have stopped filing tickets and started asking a local colleague, which is the same disengagement pattern that affects any underserved population.
Where tooling helps
Most of the recurring volume is answerable from documentation once the documentation exists, in whatever language the question arrives in. Figures below were read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 5 and 7 October 2026.
| Matram | $29, $69, $199 per month flat, seats unlimited | 95+ languages |
| SiteGPT | $468 and $948 per year, billed yearly | 95+ languages |
| Crisp | Free, $45, $95, $295 per month per workspace | No count published |
| Freshservice | $19, $49, $99 per agent plus $29 for Freddy AI | No count published |
| Zendesk | $55 plus $50 per agent per month | No count published |
Disclosure: Matram is owned by the same people who publish PeopleOpsHQ. It has no free tier, answers rather than actioning tickets, and is not an ITSM platform, so it will not configure the payroll tool that caused nine tickets in the example above. Flat pricing matters here because each new market tends to add a local contact. All eight are in our multilingual IT support comparison.
Final thoughts
The spike is not a sign that the market is difficult or that the people in it are demanding. It is the predictable cost of a set of firsts that nobody has written down yet, and it is mostly logistics and provisioning rather than anything exotic.
Audit your tool stack against the new country before the first start date, document the shipping route, and check warranty coverage before the device ships. Then watch tickets per head monthly and treat a ratio that stops falling as a list of articles you have not written.
Frequently asked questions
How many more tickets should we expect from a new market?
Three to five times your company average per person in the first month, falling towards normal by around month six if the answers get captured. The important thing to understand is that volume scales with the number of unanswered firsts rather than with headcount, so a market of four people generates almost as many distinct problems as a market of forty would. Plan from the ratio rather than from the number of joiners.
What are new market IT tickets mostly about?
Logistics first, meaning shipment status, customs holds and who pays any charge, which reach the IT desk because the device is an IT asset even though nobody there controls the courier. Provisioning second, covering accounts, licences and tools that work everywhere except the country you just opened. Local service gaps third, such as warranty cover that does not extend to the market or a repair partner with no presence there, and those are the slowest to resolve.
What should we do before the first person starts?
Audit every tool in your stack and confirm each one is configured and available in the new country, which is the dull step that prevents the largest category of avoidable tickets. Document the shipping route including courier, typical transit time, who acts as importer of record and what happens if a shipment is held. Check warranty and repair coverage for the specific device model in that country before you ship it, and name a local contact with a response time in their own working hours.
Our ratio has not fallen after four months. What does that mean?
It means the answers are not being written down, so each new person encounters the same unknowns and files the same tickets. Pull the list of topics asked more than twice and you have your content backlog, ordered for you by the people who needed it. A flat ratio is almost never evidence that the market is inherently harder to support, and treating it that way leads to staffing a problem that documentation would have solved.
Should we worry if a new market files very few tickets?
Yes, especially if the figure drops well below your company average within the first few months, because a genuinely new market should be generating more questions than average rather than fewer. The usual explanation is that people have stopped using the desk and started routing problems through whichever local colleague is most helpful, which makes the work invisible to you and concentrates it on somebody who is not resourced for it. Ask two or three people in the market where they actually take IT problems.
Does language make the spike worse?
It amplifies rather than causes, which is a useful distinction when deciding what to fix. The underlying tickets are about shipping, provisioning and local service gaps, and those would arrive in any new market regardless of language, but each one takes longer to describe and longer to resolve when neither party is working in their first language. Expect a new market in a new language to sit at the top of the three-to-five times range and to take longer to come down.
