Eight Benefits of Outsourcing Your IT Help Desk

If your IT help desk is like that of a lot of enterprises, it probably started out serving a very specific purpose, such as supporting a particular technology. Over time, growing technical needs and additional hires to support them led to a sprawling IT help desk that may no longer be effective at supporting end users.

Now, there’s a growing shift toward outsourcing the IT help desk as a way to improve the end user experience and more effectively manage the IT budget. Consider the following eight benefits of outsourcing your IT help desk:

1. Expand Access to Expertise. You may wonder how an outsourced solution could support the wide variety of solutions you’re accessing, but services that specialize in providing IT help desk services possess training across the spectrum of technology. They may already be trained in the myriad of cloud solutions you’re considering in the future and are prepared to support your end users from day one of the transition.
2. Be Prepared for Updates and Upgrades. When it’s time to upgrade your platforms or security policies, you can trust that a third-party IT help desk is already up to speed on the troubleshooting that will be necessary to support your business processes. There’s a learning curve, but you’ll never see it because the technicians were trained before you received the update.
3. Solve Management Challenges. Your sprawling IT help desk likely requires the organizational skills of multiple managers, and their task of keeping the help desk staffed can be a challenge. With an outsourced IT help desk, you can redirect the talent of those managers into other areas of IT while removing the retention problems that often plague the IT help desk. Routine and mundane help desk challenges are shifted to the service provider, and you’re able to offer your employees a more rewarding workplace experience.
4. Obtain Support During Non-Traditional Business Hours. It’s rare to find an enterprise that doesn’t have a growing staff of remote and mobile workers or employees with flexible schedules. This means that a typical 9-to-5 IT help desk isn’t helpful, much of the time. Your staff may be working in different time zones, over the weekend, and into extended evening hours. An outsourced IT help desk is available 24/7.
5. Focus on Your Core Business Mission. You’re probably not in the IT business, so running a department of people that supports technology is likely far from your core business purpose. Outsourcing your IT help desk removes the distraction from your core business objectives. You’ll still need IT professionals, of course, but they’ll be focused on strategy and driving innovation with new solutions – rather than helping sort out login problems, for instance.
6. Create New Areas of Flexibility. Outsourcing your IT help desk doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing decision. You can choose to outsource particular areas of your help desk responsibilities. These can include supporting mobile or after-hours requests, or tasks related to certain areas like passwords and authentication or firewall monitoring.
7. Improve End User Satisfaction. Take a look at wait times for your internal help desk. If your end users are being forced to wait several minutes before they are able to receive assistance, that’s costing your company both in terms of employee satisfaction and productivity costs. You should also examine the first-call resolution to see how many times the end user is in contact with the help desk, and whether that’s for resolving a single instance or because the problem keeps popping up.
8. Reduce Costs. Watch out for IT help desk providers that talk about this topic first. It’s possibly what prompted your first consideration of outsourcing your help desk, but the benefits in other areas will likely dwarf the cost savings. It’s certainly beneficial to pay a monthly subscription fee that is scalable rather than staffing your own help desk, but choose a provider that promises value – not just cost savings – to your end users and your IT department.

You may be wondering why you shouldn’t rush to sign a contract with an outsourced IT help desk provider, but there are a few instances where you may determine that it’s not the best fit for your enterprise. For instance, many organizations are adept at using the help desk to launch promising IT professionals into leadership roles, or they run their help desk so efficiently that there isn’t as much to gain from a transition.

It’s also important to note that all IT help desk providers offer different levels of service and quality. Make sure that the help desk solution you choose is not only aligned in terms of the specific technical support you’ll need, but also do some digging to determine how they line up in areas like company culture, security policies, and pursuing innovation.

When you’re ready to begin your transition to a more efficient and streamlined IT help desk, contact us at Access One. We can help you leverage the best solutions for a more satisfying experience for your end users and a bit of relief for your help desk budget.