Outsourcing any kind of business operation is a decision that involves careful consideration and evaluation for most organizations. When it comes to the IT help desk, businesses typically start with managing it in-house and think about outsourcing once they experience a significant increase in the volume of support requests, or in the cost of maintaining the in-house help desk. At this juncture, outsourced support services appear to be a cost-effective solution.
However, Calance teams have noted that several organizations still stay on the fence about deploying an outsourced IT help desk. For them, the cost reductions do not seem to outweigh the ‘perceived’ uncertainty and effort that comes with outsourcing.
In an effort to help organizations perform better cost-benefit analysis and help them make an informed decision, our team shares the four key benefits of outsourcing IT support, and how it can deliver positive ROI.
Organizations have to bear a significant cost when it comes to ensuring that employees can leverage all IT solutions to their full potential, and be productive and efficient at their jobs.
These costs can include:
However, once you decide to outsource your IT help desk, the most tangible ROI comes in the form of reducing the above costs and eliminating some altogether.
At the outset, a dedicated outsourced IT help desk takes over all support conversations and allows your employees to refocus their time and effort on their original job role.
Next, an outsourced IT support team can generate significant cost savings by:
Organizations have learned to quickly adopt new technologies and ways of working to keep up with ever-evolving market conditions. This could mean upgrading to new devices at work, adding a new tool or software to your tech stack, or even starting operations in a new location.
In all of these scenarios, a knowledgeable and helpful IT support desk is critical for success. New devices will mean your employees have new issues and queries about how to use them. A new location can mean more support queries, or require help desk availability in a different timezone.
With an internal IT help desk, you will have to invest time and money in training your support personnel or hiring new people to meet your new requirements. Additionally, the organization’s focus is split between rolling out the new changes and preparing the help desk to service the new issues and queries that will come up as a result of these changes.
However, outsourced IT support services deliver ROI in the form of on-demand scalability. Adopting a new SaaS platform, updating to new devices, or just having more agents on the help desk to handle a spike in support calls - the outsourced help desk can manage it all.
All of this can be delivered with a swift turn-around time because an outsourced IT help desk provider has the expertise and resources ready to be deployed as and when you need them.
From a faulty device, to getting locked out of an account, to not knowing how to achieve a particular task in a given software, technical challenges are ubiquitous in the professional setting. However, repeatedly encountering these issues and not having access to a reliable support team can be a major hindrance for your teams to get the work done. Unexpected technical disruptions and delayed resolution of issues can severely impact the productivity of your teams, restricting their ability to innovate on new ideas.
A knowledgeable, reliable and accessible IT help desk team can significantly improve the performance of your employees by minimizing disruptions in their work.
In other words, a high-performing IT help desk can deliver emotional ROI in the following ways:
Independent surveys that monitor support calls and seek feedback from employees can help you determine how your teams feel about the outsourced IT support services, and whether you are receiving the emotional ROI.
Managing a high-performing internal help desk can be time, effort, and cost-intensive for a lot of organizations. The hiring and training requirements aside, there is also a need for planning, managing and efficiently running a whole department that takes up a considerable part of the operational budget.
However, outsourcing the IT help desk not only reduces the cost commitments but also drastically cuts down on the time and effort your organization needs to spend on ensuring high-quality help desk performance. Once you onboard an outsourced service provider, your involvement is limited largely to a few aspects:
This reduced involvement means that teams previously engaged with the help desk or in informal support activities can reclaim their time. They can engage in more value-added activities and focus on core business processes to drive growth.
As you can see, investing in outsourced IT help desk services doesn’t just deliver ROI in the form of reduced costs. While the financial ROI is the most straightforward one to measure, there are key benefits of outsourcing IT support that is realized in the form of scalability, productivity, and freeing up time and resources for key business activities.
It is important to note that the ROI outlined here is heavily contingent on the quality of service and level of performance of the outsourced help desk provider that you choose. In order to make this process easier for decision-makers, we have created a list of the four major challenges to outsourcing IT help desk support and how to resolve them.
At Calance, we are committed to learning about your specific requirements and technical systems, as well as your organizational culture in order to provide customized solutions and expert support.