There a number of factors you should look at when considering outsourcing your help desk. Obviously, cost is the primary one everyone focuses on. But there are other questions you should consider such as: Do you have enough staffing today or the expertise? Can you keep them busy or interested? Do you have Service Levels (i.e. ASA or ABR) today or would it be easier to hold an outside vendor to those? What Quality Assurance measurements are in place today to improve agent performance? What is the cost of downtime to your company's bottom line? Is support focused on core competencies to improve this bottom line? Are you getting accurate reporting and a clear picture of service from the help desk? Do you have industry standard best practices and processes in place or could you benefit from that outside expertise? Do you conduct customer satisfaction surveys to see how your service is doing? Do you have the latest technology to improve the caller experience at the help desk?

These are just some of the questions you should consider when looking at outsourcing your help desk.

At GHDSi, we work diligently to provide quality technical support services to your environment through ongoing Quality Assurance methodologies such as silent monitoring of the support calls by supervisory staff. We also review the trouble documentation for accuracy and timeliness of action. Service Levels are designed and agreed upon such as how quickly we will answer the phone, how quickly we can get a "live body" to the trouble site according to the Severity of the problem and the average percentage of calls we must resolve at first touch. Ongoing communications and knowledge sharing is key to the success of the support structure.

An average user calls the help desk 1.25 times per month. Given this statistic, a population of 1,000 users would generate an average of 1,250 calls per month.

Per-incident pricing typically allows you to contact the help desk multiple times until the parent issue is resolved. Per-incident pricing is only quoted for Tier 3 incidents where the issue requires research by the Help Desk Senior Analysts. Per-call pricing is the most common in our industry whereby the analysts provide support on today's most common applications and networks.

Relationship. That is the key to our success at GHDSi. We work with you and your teams to develop daily working relationships in order to better understand and service your callers. Every environment has special needs - from special handling of executives to accommodating surgical teams and complete sales forces. By performing effective due diligence we can tailor service levels to maintain high productivity.

We will provide you with an assigned Relationship Advocate who will be your "Single Point of Contact" for any changes, additions or deletions of the agreed upon Scope of Work. The Relationship Advocate will work with you to design and implement a Communications Plan for all parties involved in the support cycle, their hours of availability, the items they are responsible for and documented escalation procedures.

We are located in Hartford, Connecticut. We service customers throughout the world. Geography is not a deterrent for us to provide quality, efficient technical support to your office, mobile or manufacturing environments.

Lack of buy-in or commitment to an internal Help Desk from upper management

Many companies do not make a serious commitment to the Help Desk. Due to a lack of understanding and communication, the Help Desk is the one entity that is lost in the shuffle. A typical response may be: “How much is needed for a group that answers questions about Microsoft Office and modems. Just give them 5 cubicles on the 4th floor and let them exist…” These are the attitudes that exist in most companies until a real crisis arises. Oftentimes the need for the Help Desk rears its ugly head when a VIP is down, or some business-critical function is lost. Then managers begin to write processes designed to fix individual issues instead of designing workflow processes to service the enterprise.

Help Desk is not aligned with the mission of the company as a whole

In most of the current service industry models, the help desk should be the core of the business function, not only performing problem management, but also handling the flow of information to all entities of IT. If the purpose and mission of the Help Desk has not been communicated to upper management, then the Help Desk will never fully serve the corporate environment. The Help Desk must be aligned with the mission of the company as a whole. One question most help desk consultants and sales personnel ask during due diligence is, “Does the Help Desk meet the need of the business requirement?”

Help Desk becomes a priority and the Help Desk staff doesn’t have the expertise or training

Many times, personnel are placed at the Help Desk because it sounded like an interesting job, or the company ran out of other departmental opportunities due to layoffs, restructuring etc. Because these personnel had served in other areas of the company, management believed these people could handle a Help Desk position - until the phones started ringing and the quality fell. It then becomes a chore for the IT group to ask for funding for training, skilled personnel and trained customer service Managers.

The cost of support is too high to have an internal Help Desk

The costs of telephony, PCs and staffing is more than most companies are willing to spend each year and as a result will sometimes streamline their IT operations, focusing on their core competencies. Staffing is typically the largest percentage of an IT manager’s budget.

The internal help desks cannot handle high call volumes and provide 80% same call/day resolutions

The Help Desk function has not been taken seriously and the internal Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for resolution are non-existent. Staffing ratios vs. call volume, training and hiring the proper skill sets contribute to this issue