With advancements in technology lowering the barriers to entry in almost every industry, companies must become more efficient to survive – let alone thrive – in an increasingly competitive marketplace. One of the ways companies achieve this is by outsourcing parts of their business to external companies that specialise in that particular business function – with their IT help desk being a prominent example.
In this post, we detail the top 10 benefits of outsourcing your help desk.
What Is an Outsourced Help Desk?
An outsourced help desk refers to a situation where an organisation hires an external company to handle its IT support requirements.
When an organisation has an in-house help desk, the technical issues raised by employees are logged and solved by its own IT support staff. In contrast, with an outsourced help desk, technical problems are handled by an external company that specialises in providing help desk support.
Top 10 Benefits of Outsourcing Help Desk Services
Faster Help Desk Response Times
One of the biggest issues with in-house help desks is slow response times. If a help desk isn’t well-structured and is overwhelmed by having to juggle multiple priorities, it can lead to logged calls being resolved slowly.
When you outsource your help desk services, you’ll agree on a set of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with your service provider. These SLAs are based on key metrics like average speed to answer, average handling time, and first-call resolution rates and allow you to define the service provider’s performance.
More importantly, SLAs hold the outsourced service provider accountable and it’s in their best interest to reach these standards if they hope to secure your business for the long-term and preserve their reputation.
Subsequently, this results in reduced response times and faster resolution of technical issues, leading to more productive and happier employees.
More Cost-Effective
When you factor in the cost of hiring (and replacing) help desk staff, training and professional development, IT equipment and software, and employee benefit packages, outsourcing your help desk is usually more cost-effective – sometimes significantly so. Plus, with a monthly service charge instead of fluctuating, ad-hoc expenses, it’s far easier to control your IT budget.
Easier to Scale According to Demand
Help desks are never consistently busy and every company experiences periods with high and low call volumes. Consequently, most in-house help desks fluctuate between being rammed with calls and twiddling their thumbs when things are quiet.
Alternatively, outsourcing your help desk makes it easy to scale your level of support up or down in line with demand. Instead of rushing to hire more staff if your help desk is consistently overwhelmed, or in anticipation of a busy period, you can simply contact your service provider and request additional resources. Alternatively, you can request less personnel when you’re less busy – so you only pay for the amount of support that you need.
Specialisation
An outsourced IT support company specialises in providing IT support; it’s their entire service offering and purpose as an organisation. Subsequently, they’ve repeatedly defined, developed, and delivered outsourced help desk solutions for different companies. They’ve had the time and opportunity to see what works best, which resources to employ, how to train their staff, etc. Consequently, they’re capable of delivering higher levels of support than an in-house help desk, who don’t have the same varied experience.
You Get to Focus on Your Core Business Function
Fortunately, the specialisation isn’t just one way. By outsourcing your help desk, your IT staff can focus on your company’s main business function. Instead of having their attention constantly divided by incoming support requests, they can concentrate on tasks and projects that add the most value to the company, overall.
Better still, this doesn’t just apply to your IT staff but to all employees involved in the support and administration of your help desk, including HR, Finance, and members of your management team. With an outsourced help desk, your workforce can concentrate on what they do best – which will make your company more productive and, ultimately, more profitable.
Access to More Resources
Most companies don’t have the budget or desire, to consistently purchase the latest IT equipment, applications or support solutions. Outsourced service providers, meanwhile, always keep up to date with the latest tools and technology and will implement them quickly if they help them meet, or surpass, their agreed SLAs. This not only grants your company access to a wider variety of support resources but it future-proofs your help desk – without having to overextend yourself financially.
No Need to Hire and Train Support Staff
As outsourced help desks employ their own personnel, you won’t have to recruit and onboard help desk staff. You also won’t have to worry about staff turnover. Best of all, you won’t be responsible for the help desk staff’s ongoing professional development or making sure they’re trained to use the latest technologies: your outsourced service provider will handle that for you. This will save your company money and, more importantly, time – which can now be spent on more productive activities.
Comprehensive Support Outside Main Business Hours
With an in-house help desk, providing adequate out-of-hours support for your staff can be challenging. You might not have the personnel to consistently offer the same level of support that you can during business hours. This is especially true of small, internal help desks, that instantly become vulnerable when a team member gets sick, goes on vacation, or leaves the company.
An outsourced help desk, on the other hand, can be available 24/7. This is especially important in this post-COVID world, as flexible work practices are only going to become more commonplace. Knowing support staff will be there if they run into any technical issues, your employees will feel comfortable working their preferred schedule.
Gain Better Insights Through Reporting
For an outsourced service provider to know if it’s meeting its SLAs, it needs to measure against key performance metrics, such as average handling time, and first-call resolution rates. Subsequently, outsourced help desk providers can provide comprehensive reports, which detail their performance and the nature of each call they log.
The first benefit of these reports is that they show both you and the outsourced help desk provider which aspects of support they could improve upon. Secondly, reports will reveal which technical problems your staff are running into repeatedly. These new insights allow you to get to the root cause of recurring technical problems and be proactive in supporting your staff instead of just being reactive.
Improved Company Culture
A slow, in-house help desk can cause tension between the support teams and the rest of the business. If left to fester, this can develop into an “us vs them” mentality within your organisation – which is terrible for your company’s culture. Outsourcing your help desk prevents such an issue from developing. In fact, with faster response times and your IT staff freed up to dedicate themselves to more stimulating projects, your company culture will be enhanced.
COVID And Outsourced Help Desks
While an outsourced help desk is hugely beneficial in conventional times, the COVID pandemic has made the idea of an outsourced help desk an even greater necessity.
The first reason for this is a remote workforce. Now that employees aren’t working at their desks, on devices that have been precisely configured for their job, there’s a higher chance of them running into technical difficulties.
Plus, they don’t have the luxury of asking the more-technically savvy colleague sitting beside them for a little help. Nor can they grab one of the IT support staff, while they’re solving a technical issue close by, and persuade them to quickly resolve their issue. As a result, more calls will be logged with a help desk than when everyone is working from the office.
To avoid backlogs, bottlenecks, and burnt-out IT staff, your help desk needs to be as efficient as possible. An outsourced help desk is an ideal solution to these problems in the post-pandemic landscape. An outsourced service provider will employ more staff, their personnel will be better trained, and they’ll have systems in place to better handle high call volumes.
The second reason outsourcing your help desk is a smart strategy is that it shields you from the labour shortage caused by the pandemic. With an in-house help desk, you’re responsible for recruiting your own staff, and with skilled labour being increasingly harder to find, it will take longer and cost more than previously.
When you outsource your help desk, your service provider will take care of all that for you. Not only will this allow your management team and HR department to concentrate on other tasks but you’ll be delegating the recruitment of your IT support staff to an organisation that’s better at it.
Royal IT: Your Outsourced Help Desk Solution
At Royal IT, we use a three-step process to create an outsourced help desk solution tailored to meet the unique needs of your company. After carefully examining your current IT infrastructure, we’ll determine the levels and methods of help desk support that will increase employee productivity and boost your company’s profitability.
To find out more about outsourcing your company’s IT help desk, contact one of our account managers.