As a Tampa Bay-area solution provider, I’ve been doing IT for over 27 years. While I’m always on the lookout for new ways to increase efficiency and seize new revenue opportunities, there’s one cost-cutting measure that I’m possibly considering: outsourced help desk. I’ve heard other VARs rave about the results and the ease of implementing this strategy, but I’m not sold on it yet.
With outsourced help desk, you can get:
- 24/7/365 coverage
- lower expense than internal resources
- more of an ITIL process
- the ability to pursue new verticals such as EMR (electronic medical records), if the help desk service has certification in those areas
- more than a message service, they create a ticket and work it, moving tickets to us if a senior engineer is needed or if there is a field service need
Why I Keep Our Helpdesk In-house
I have direct control of the help desk staff. I hire them, train them, and can hear their calls day in and day out. An outsourced resource will not be under my direct control. More importantly, my help desk is the voice of my company. When my clients call, they want to hear a familiar voice, someone who they’ve dealt with before, who understands them. My help desk is also the frontline, who can read the tone of conversations to notify my team of the client’s mood. And they are alert to new sales opportunities as well. Will outsourced help desk staff be really invested in the good will of my clients? Maybe, maybe not.
At the end of the day, what I own is the relationship with my clients. When the person they deal with on a regular basis is in a call center hundreds of miles away, how can they feel engaged with my practice?
Where do you stand?
David Bellini is president of ConnectWise. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsor program.
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I whole heartedly agree. In my experience having run a couple of IT Co’s and having spoken to thousands of IT Co’s during my time with GFI MAX – Our customers ‘own’ the relationships and front lining this with people who just ‘care less’ is unlikely promote these relationships.
Customers are comforted by speaking to familiar technicians – the tech’s know the people, the places, the history, the plans and you just don’t get this with outsourced helpdesks.
There’s a delicate balancing act – Scale | Memorable Service
Just my tuppenceworth.
Chris Martin
GFI MAX Remote Management
For full disclosure here, I am a bit bias as Do IT Smarter is an “outsource” help desk provider to 100′s of customers through our channel of resellers. This type of service does provide all of the benefits that David mentions. But it also provides a benefit that many think is a benefit of an internal help desk and that is the relationship with the customer.
To David’s point “At the end of the day, what I own is the relationship with my clients”. With an outsource help desk you still own the relationship with your clients, in fact not having to staff and manage a help desk allows you to focus more time on your clients. You see if you choose the right help desk partner they will become an extension of your company and your customers will only know that you are providing excellent service. I know that while our channel partners tell their customers they are working with Do IT Smarter many of the callers just know that their local partner is providing the service and that they have a lot of great people on the help desk.
From my perspective what companies are asking for is not that you know how to staff a help desk but that you know how to help them leverage technology to reduce their costs, increase productivity and give them a competitive advantage. By outsourcing the help desk this leaves you to focus your energies on managing a more experienced staff that focuses on being a strategic partner to your customers while at the same time providing a sound ongoing support solution.
The only time that you stop “owning the relationship” is when you stop paying attention, stop visiting them regularly and stop helping them grow their business.
Chris to your point about “front lining this with people who just ‘care less’”. Really? Why would the outsourced help desk technician care less? As all we do is help desk (and NOC services) the help desk is all our employees do every day. This is their job; they take pride in their job just as you do. If not they don’t last long. Our employees have weekly reviews, are certified by the Help Desk Institute, attend regular training and have a solid career path. These people do care. I am just speaking for Do IT Smarter here but it would surprise me if my competitors felt differently.
Lane Smith
Do IT Smarter
http://www.doitsmarter.com
Hi Lane – Thanks for the reply – good points. You’re right – ‘care less’ is perhaps too strong a phrase
In my experience, there’s a really strong bond that forms between customers and ‘their’ IT technicians. The technician ‘takes ownership’ of the customer site and the customer wants to deal with their most fequent technician.
I think what i finished with – it’s fine if you want to scale but many IT Co’s (and I was speaking to one yesterday) want less customers with more of a relationship.
There’s a balance to be struck between scale and service. But, I’m sure there’s room enough for both angles.
I agree with Lane whole heartedly. While maintaining direct account ownership and fostering a positive relationship at every interaction with those clients is the goal of any business, a well-delivered third party service will not reduce your ability to do just that.
We need to get away from the mentality in this business that we must own and operate every facet of our delivery process (help desk, NOC, datacenter) and get over the irrational fear that by not owning every piece of it out our customer relationships will be destroyed or weakened.
Certainly 3rd parties must be managed to ensure quality delivery, but your customer relationships are dependent on the overall quality of the customer experience you provide, and owning the entire service delivery supply chain will likely strain your capabilities and limit your opportunities if growth is your objective.
Great post David! This has been in discussion here for the past couple of years and I’m left with the same opinions and questions.
We explored the outsourced help desk for three months with a few clients who were willing to be a test bed for this experiment. Our findings mirror your preconceptions. First and foremost, the quality of the helpd esk was outstanding and we monitored that very closely with surveys and follow-up calls. However here were my findings:
1. We don’t get many phone calls as we have encouraged our clients to use both email and our ConnectWise portal to initiate service requests, hence the help desk needs to be an integral part of your service management platform.
2. The help desk was prompt to address tickets on our service board, yet often had to call the client in response. If the client wasn’t available, they would leave a message with their 800 number, but more often than not the client would return the call OUR office looking for Joe, Bob, or whoever else may have left the message. Hence, the client needed multiple phone numbers (helpdesk, sales, customer service) for the same small company and we were left receiving phone calls for people we don’t know.
3. 75% of our help desk calls deal with line of business applications and were unable to be properly supported and thereby had to be escalated to our engineers anyway.
4. We lost a vital communication line with our clients – the first tier of support. As David mentioned, this is the pulse of our company. We never received input as to the tone of the call/ticket (happy, upset, etc…)
5. The outsourced help desk did not indentify sales oppportunities, meaning we had to spend more time with the client to uncover these. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but more time = more money and the higher costs of spending this time offset any potential savings.
6. We found a disconnect with keeping communication active between parts of the company and the help desk. Many help desk calls are transferred to an account manager, you may have a company on credit hold who may need to speak to accounting first, or you may need to escalate the call immediately to a next tier support, all of which suffered.
So while I found the help desk to be extremely competent and customer service driven, the disconnect with our clients in the end wasn’t a fit for what we are trying to accomplish as a company, and without that first tier connection we lost full account ownership. This certainly would not be the same for back-end support (NOC, etc…) but rather with any “face” time with the client.
When reviewing the model more fully, I found that it is an excellent fit for either very small companies looking to grow cost-effectively, or larger companies where there is a more substantial help desk that can be outsourced for savings. All taken into consideration, my costs of running help desk internally ended up being less expensive than outsourcing.
I would be anxious to hear how others have solved the issues that we experienced, since they seem to be more relationship-based. In the interim, I will be keeping my helpdesk internal and maintaining an open mind on the matter.
Brett Jaffe
IT4, Inc.
I must also agree with Lanes’ view on an outsourced Help Desk. As the President of Live Virtual Helpdesk, I would be sorely disappointed if any of our front line staff were less than fully engaged on our clients’ behalf. We spend a lot of time in training and fostering a style of collaborative support and, along with rigorous background checks, anyone who doesn’t fit our type just doesn’t get hired. Because of that process our staff turnover is practically nonexistent which means customers will often get to know the particular members of our staff and, conversely, our staff become familiar with the customers and the particular approach to support they demand. The MSP always owns the relationship simply by being able to spend more time working on billable projects, for their client, while we take care of the day to day issues for them. It’s a win for all sides.
It also takes a great deal of money and time to build an effective help desk staffed with your own employees; and most of our MSP clients simply don’t have the resources or the inclination to do that. As for being in another location; we’ve not had anyone tell us they were concerned by that – all they want is excellent live-voice support for their clients, wherever it comes from. We make every effort to make sure we keep our clients (and their clients) happy. After all, and I know it’s a cliché, but we wouldn’t have a business without them.
If you can afford to run your own help desk service, that’s great; but in the meantime there are some good services out there; you just have to know where to look.
Neil Jones
LiveVHD Services Inc.
Memo to self: I need to blog about help desk issues. Thank you, David, for starting this reader conversation.
Personally, I think the help desk debate depends on core focus and specific applications/business needs:
1. For basic PC support, I don’t really worry about who’s running the help desk. As long as the help desk is responsive I’ll survive.
2. But when it comes to the core applications that keep our websites (i.e., our business) online, I want to deal directly with the service provider to ensure they understand our apps and business.
-jp
Great article on a great topic. Even so much that I had to write about it as well.
http://blogs.emonarch.net/sean/2010/02/outsource-v2.html