Considerations for Rising need of IT Help Desk Outsourcing Services
Help Desk Outsourcing are the behind-the-scenes human face of any company’s support system. Business use IT Help Desk Services to help their customers with troubleshooting issues, facilitating solutions to the known problems and provide 24*7 availability to customers.
Unfortunately, IT staffs are overwhelmed with technical support issues and don’t have time for strategic projects that grow your business. The IT labor shortage compounds the issues to create a dedicated support team. Many internal teams also face infrastructure issues while continuing remove work during this pandemic.
Even before COVID, help desk outsourcing services were popular among CIOs since it offers an easy and cost-effective way to modernize the technical support and free internal staff to focus on valuable tasks. It has become more important than ever before to focus on the core competencies and strategic tasks even after an unprecedented number of demands arise due to pandemic challenges.
Outsourcing a good service provider delivers instant access to tools, resources and expertise needed to transform ineffective help desks. With the right outsourcing service provider, organizations can expect high performance service desks to resolve 80% of customer issues.
It’s true that IT help desk outsourcing can be less expensive than doing it yourself due to many economic challenges. Apart from cost, there are multiple benefits of help desk outsourcing.
By engaging with an outsourcing partner, an organization can gain number of advantages which includes:
1. Save cost on labor and infrastructure
2. Focus on strategic and potential tasks
3. Provide faster resolution to customers
4. Access to highly skilled and well-trained IT help desk professionals
5. 24*7 customer support
6. Utilize the best technologies available out in the market
7. Productivity and better performance achievements
8. Adding wide range of services
9. Establish and better management of service levels
These benefits can only be realized if the right outsourcing partner is chosen. Organizations must be able to properly evaluate the needs, cost and capabilities required for the services before choosing the outsourcing partner.
The Best Practice to take well planned approach could be outlined in the following ways:
1. Envision — During this phase, you will define the vision of the service desk and compare with the current capabilities. You will also evaluate your internal cost and plan a budget for your outsourcing solution.
If you don’t define your expectations and communicate them properly with the vendors, the services might go underutilized or do not match your business needs. Hence ask few questions to yourself to examine the need. E.g., What services do you need from the Service Desk?
During envision phase, do not restrict yourself to budget or other constraints. Just list down all the services that you would want from the help desk. Make sure to get inputs from all the stakeholders who rely on Service Desk.
After determining all the services, determine the capabilities of your current help desk. If there are gaps between your service requirement and your current capabilities, document those listing and that becomes a good business case to support an outsourced solution.
2. Build — During this phase, you will develop an RFP outlining the services required, distribute to the vendors, and evaluate the responses. Although price is a key consideration but there are other factors which determine the success of your outsourcing relationship.
You may wish to weigh the evaluated criteria and see which vendor fulfills the most important criteria and score them accordingly. Also find the one who is culturally fit which is the greater odds in the success of your partnership.
To understand vendor’s culture, you can ask questions like what is their vision statement? How do they manage the evaluation of employee performance etc.
3. Deploy — The deploy phase will transition the service delivery from internal to external resources. The vendor should be able to document and outline their transition process into your organization. Questions like what their time frame for transition of services can be asked during this phase.
4. Manage — Once the services have been transitioned, the relationship needs to be managed closely. It is important to designate someone within your organization to a senior management role to represent your organization.
On the other hand, vendor should be willing to supply a dedicated relationship manager and build this role in the contract. Over the time, changes will be required to improve the business processes and adjust to unforeseen business requirements. This allows for proper direction to escalate and resolve any issues which may arise.
Conclusion
Choosing the right help desk outsourcing partner for your help desk support plays a major role in the success of your organization. By proceeding through the above process in a thoughtful manner, you will be able to understand your help desk requirements and capabilities of potential vendors to meet those requirements.
31West is a leading provider of 24*7 outsourcing solutions serving small and medium businesses in US for more than a decade. Our contact center helps business enhance their customer experience, reduce cost, increase revenue, and build customer loyalty.
