What do you do when a vendor hurts your company’s reputation?
That was the question faced by a world-class marine transportation equipment and logistics firm when they discovered the cascading problems caused by their help desk support. After outsourcing these services to an offshore organization, the company quickly found that the support being provided was inadequate.
Internally, this caused strife for employees who found themselves plagued by downtime, slowed service times, and a hampered ability to serve customers. Externally, these issues caused the company to look less competent to its customers.
Left to continue, this cycle could have had a devastating effect on the business.
Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. After firing their old vendor, the firm chose Global Help Desk Services Inc.(GHDSi) to rebuild their help desk support. We were happy to help them turn things around, but we know for many businesses, an experience like this raises an important question: When your reputation is on the line, why outsource any tech support at all?
Why Do Businesses Outsource IT Support?
Before we talk about help desk services specifically, let’s zoom out to look at why businesses choose to outsource IT and tech support in general.
Whether it’s a small mom-and-pop shop or a large enterprise business, the decision to outsource tech support is often driven by a lack of internal staff. For larger organizations, that could be because there are multiple locations in need of support. For smaller organizations, it may be that they need support for something very particular, such as a SaaS application or cloud services, and can’t afford to hire a specialist.
And that gets at the primary reason to outsource: It helps businesses save money.
The Cost of Going It Alone
Let’s consider again the example of the marine transportation firm we mentioned above. After they had a bad experience with their original vendor, why didn’t they try to build out an internal team? Three reasons:
- First, the cost of having support staff available 24/7 would be very expensive. This kind of coverage requires, at the bare minimum, five to six full-time staff.
- Second, adding a new department would put new demands on the management team, limiting their availability to focus on more important strategic enterprise initiatives.
- Finally, the capital expense and effort of acquiring, customizing, and maintaining the necessary tools for the new team would be significant — both up front and over the long term.
In light of all that, the firm decided that outsourcing was still the most cost-effective solution. It was just a matter of finding the right partner to work with.
What Does Outsourcing Tech Support Entail?
Different companies have different needs. There’s just no one-size-fits-all model that works for everyone. As such, any tech support services they engage should consider their specific circumstances to develop a solution.
Because of this, the first step in outsourcing tech support is typically adiscovery period to identify your needs and develop a road map.
This can be a great help for companies launching a digital transformation project, or those who need more robust capabilities for processing data. Outsourced tech support can shepherd them through these processes and help them reach their goals, using their expertise and vast breadth of knowledge.
One caveat, however: When outsourcing to a company with a vast breadth of services, it’s important to know how much energy and resources are devoted to each type of service. For instance, if the support your organization needs is primarily help desk, but that’s only 10% of your provider’s business, you may feel (and be treated) like an afterthought. In cases like that, it pays to work with a specialist.
Why Do Companies Outsource Help Desk Support?
So far we’ve been talking broadly about tech support, but what if you need something more targeted? What if your biggest challenge in IT is with providing your people the help desk support that they need? If that’s the case, you’re likely facing challenges like these:
- No SLA for your service desk
- Poor coverage that doesn’t go beyond regular business hours
- A lack of customer service skills among help desk staff
- No good way to add staff and maintain customer service levels
- Users that would rather look for answers online than call your help desk
- Frequent (and costly) turnover among your help desk staff
- Do those problems sound familiar? They’re not unlike the challenges faced by the marine equipment firm we’ve touched on before. In fact, these kinds of issues are extremely common among organizations struggling with ineffective help desk services or the growing pains that come with success.
At its most basic, the reason companies outsource their help desk support is to improve the level of service they receive while simultaneously saving money. By choosing to work with a company like GHDSi,you get support that’s solely focused on your help desk experience.
Spend Less for Better Service by Outsourcing
Not long after the marine transportation firm hired us for help desk support, our team was put to the test. The client’s entire network went offline for several days, leading to a high volume of frantic customer calls in urgent need of support.
Throughout this experience, the help desk professionals at GHDSi presented an image of calm and competence to the client’s customers. Acting as a true partner to our client, we helped their customers through a difficult time and got them to the other side of the crisis.
Though the problem has long since been resolved, we continue to enjoy a relationship with our client based on mutual respect, cooperation, and open communications.
If you plan to outsource your own help desk support, you should accept nothing less.
