User downtime costs companies a lot. It costs businesses to pay employees who are not able to be productive. Downtime also means that employees may not complete revenue-generating tasks – compounding the costs to your business. That time, and increased cost, can multiply quickly if you don’t have the right IT resources in place to support your business.
Here is a simple formula to work out how much you may be losing:
We have been partnering with businesses for over 20 years to provide IT resources. During that time, we have found five areas in which outsourcing saves time and money:
Increased Responsiveness
Quicker Turnaround, No Matter the Complexity
Trend Analysis and Reporting
End User Education
Early Outage Detection
Five Ways Outsourcing Your Service Desk Reduces End User Downtime
Increased Responsiveness
- An outsourced service desk’s main responsibility is to help and support your end users. It is ready to assist promptly without having to draw resources away from other tasks, unlike what internal teams must do.
- A good service desk provider should offer strong service level metrics around responsiveness. Key metrics include average speed to answer, mean time to resolve, first contact resolution – meaning the service desk is judged by its speed and accuracy
- Multi-channel options within your service desk will give quick response via phone, chat, email, or self service
Quicker Turnaround, No Matter the Complexity
- Combining services like proactive management and higher level/tier escalation paths (Level 2 & 3) will help the service desk identify problems before you even notice them, and get them resolved quickly
- A high level 1 resolution rate will get your end users back to work quickly by reducing delay-causing escalations
- A professional service desk has refined systems in place to categorize and prioritize tickets correctly. This will help highlight critical, business impacting, incidents and problems that should be part of detailed trends analysis and reporting.
Trend Analysis and Reporting
- Is Outlook constantly breaking? Is a certain printer giving you problems? Using properly categorized tickets by your help desk, trend data analysis, and root cause analysis you will be ahead of lingering issues that cause end user headaches and drive downtime. When issues are better known, improvements can be made.
- Accurate data will help you strategically budget and plan necessary IT projects
- Performance reporting can validate service levels are being met as well as provide insight on opportunities for improvements like:
- New, more efficient, processes
- Retraining
- Internal staffing initiatives
End User Education
- Your service desk should provide end users with knowledge of how to prevent problems from recurring including how to remediate issues themselves.
- Frequently asked questions and knowledge base articles pushed to end users should be part of your end user education process.
- Self-service portals and service catalogs will increase your end user’s confidence levels with technology, which leads to increased productivity.
Early Outage Detection
- Recognizing outages or problems when they first begin is key to bringing service back on line.
- Service desk can quickly post situation-specific Interactive Voice Responses (IVRs), escalate to appropriate teams, and increase awareness
- Through the Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) software, service desk personnel are able to see a spike in calls and immediately know there’s an issue and begin work towards a resolution.
If you don’t see these cost-saving practices from your service desk, make the switch and start saving money and time. Ensure a strong service level agreement is in place that includes detailed, monthly reporting with suggestions for improvements that will continue to generate returns.