When to Consider Outsourcing Your Service Desk
Debating whether to keep your internal service desk or outsourcing it to an IT Service partner? There are many factors to consider outside of cost savings when evaluating the best options for outsourced IT support.
End-user satisfaction, response time, turnover, end-user downtime, and data visibility all play key roles in making decisions around your IT strategy. Issues with four critical support factors below may mean it is time to consider an outsourced service desk.
Employee Satisfaction
Employee satisfaction is one of the largest contributing factors to longevity and tenure in a position. Frequent IT or support issues can drive down an employee’s satisfaction and productivity, ultimately decreasing their happiness in their position.
A responsive and people-focused outsourced service desk will get your end-users back to working on important company goals while having positive interactions with the IT team.
Poor Response Time
Poor responsiveness from your service desk can be the symptom of a variety of problems. Are your support teams overworked and spread too thin? Are your technicians splitting their focus between end-user support and more strategic objectives and projects? Does your service desk have response time SLAs?
All of these could lead to poor response times. Poor response times lead to a loss in productivity, a loss in end-user satisfaction, and ultimately a loss in profit. A service desk that connects with users quickly, resolves issues quicker and keeps users productive.
Turnover in IT
Turnover within the service desk, or any IT position, can be frequent and for a multitude of reasons. According to Glassdoor, hiring a new teammate costs $4,000 on average. Frequent turnover not only costs organizations time and money, but support staff turnover lessens the effectiveness of the support team overall.
Other IT teammates must pick up the slack either taking time away from other strategic projects or splitting their time between user support and their regular duties. This choice between support and projects often leads to increased wait times for users and delays in project completion dates.
Engaging an outsourced service desk provides a level of stability that may be hard to achieve internally. Besides stability, the Managed Service Provider takes on the hiring, training, and other management responsibilities – freeing up the internal teams to focus elsewhere.
The drains on time and resources don’t stop with hiring. The new teammates must then go through training and onboarding. When organizations partner with an outsourced service desk, the partner will bring a trained team that is ready to hit the ground running.
Lack of Reporting or Data
Data analysis and reporting provide clarity. Not capturing critical data like overall volume, ticket counts, and ticket types makes it difficult to understand where you need to focus IT efforts.
An outsourced service desk will have dedicated account or reporting resources who track data and report on it, highlighting information that may be otherwise missed. An outsourced provider will give you the management structure needed to analyze what they’re seeing so you can make smart and strategic decisions.
IT support is a critical component of the overall productivity and profitability of any company. End-user downtime can lead not only lead to a poor work experience, but lost opportunities to drive your companies revenue.
Partnering with a quality outsourced service desk provider will provide the support, stability, and data, to make your IT department shine!