Should You Consider Outsourcing Your Help Desk?

November 15, 2017

Should You Consider Outsourcing Your Help Desk?

For quite a few organizations one of the biggest frustrations is the management of their IT and technology. For businesses under 100 employees, it rarely makes sense to have a full time IT person dedicated to just maintaining the technology. Most of the time, there are individuals that wear multiple hats including social media, marketing, even business owners themselves that get tasked with managing the IT and technology. This normally proves to be problematic since there is no one individual that is accountable for IT performance.

So How Do You Know If You Should Consider Outsourcing Your Help Desk?

Ask yourself the following questions;

Do you or your employees experience the same issue more than once without resolution?
Do you worry about how much time and productivity is lost due to IT or technical issues?
Do you worry about how secure your environment is?
Do you worry about ransomware and the threats associated with losing your data?
Would you like to have a better ability to forecast costs associated with technology further into the future?
Do you worry about not being able to keep up with the rapid pace of change with technology
Do you worry about only having one person(or no one dedicated) to take care of all of your IT needs?
Do you wish you had a more solid strategy for technology to be more competitive or efficient in your organization?
Do you wish you felt more comfortable about your ability to survive an outage or data loss?

If you answered yes to two or more of these questions, outsourcing your help desk may dramatically alleviate frustrations!

What Are the Advantages to Outsourcing Your Help Desk?

Instead of a single person or even part-time person you get access to a team of individuals with expansive knowledge, experience and who are highly certified
A business process around supporting your technology
Defined metrics around the technology supporting your business
A more secured and monitored environment
Fixed expense that can be budgeted and known ahead of time
Accountability for all aspects of technology
Predictable results

What are the common concerns around Outsourcing Your Help Desk?

Will I know what I am getting in terms of services?
How quickly will my issues be resolved?
How do I know it is secure?
Will it cost a lot?
How do I choose the right provider?

These are all items to consider when evaluating whether or not your organization should outsource their help desk and IT management. The list of concerns are typical for most organizations and the answers to those questions really can define whether or not outsourcing your help desk is right for you. The best place to start is to first outline how big of an impact technology has on your operations. Next start tracking how many times you or your employees have issues. Get a number that you can identify as numbers of issues each month and if they are common issues that reoccur or one-time issues. To put it all into perspective, look at the time involved with each issue in terms of how much it impacts your employees and the person responsible for solving the issue. The return on investment calculation will involve the total time tied up with issues from both staff as well as the person solving the IT issues, not just the person responsible for solving the issue. Each organization will be different and depending how many employees, how critical technology is to the operation, and how much time is spent on issues as to whether or not outsourcing your help desk and IT management makes sense for you.

What If We Are Not Ready to Outsource Our Help Desk Just Yet? Are There Tools To Help Until We Are?

Certainly!! Some of the same tools that Managed Service Providers use are available to you to use as well. The secret sauce isn’t the tools, its the process behind the tools that delivers the results.

Here are some great options to try;