Computer Network Support for Medium-size Companies

The Economics of Help Desk Outsourcing or Co-sourcing
Progent's Help Desk management and co-management services deliver significant business value in comparison to going it alone with a Help Desk Call Center run solely by in-house IT personnel. Some of the benefits of Help Desk outsourcing, like improved computer uptime, obviously contribute to worker output but are difficult to assess precisely in dollars. Other areas, like internal salaries vs. granular billing for outsourced Help Desk Call Center services, can be misleading at first sight. This comparison will investigate some of the major cost/benefit issues associated with going with an in-house or an outsourced or co-sourced Help Desk Call Center.

If you have an in-house Help Desk Call Center, you may have to make a decision whether you should expand your support staff or outsource/co-source Help Desk Call Center services. You could reach this juncture due to a variety of common situations. These include:

• Business expansion is swamping your Help Desk
• One of your Help Desk Call Center support staff has left
• You are opening a new office in a different city
• Work-from-Home (WFH) users have increased Help Desk Call Center call volume and introduced different types of support problems
• Your Help Desk team members are required for helping with strategic IT projects

The Cost of an Internal Help Desk Worker
It's tempting but unrealistic to compare the raw salaries of in-house personnel with the granular per-minute costs of an external Help Desk Call Center group. Although typical costs for an in-house IT support worker vary from city to city (e.g., Tupelo vs. New York), most regions in the U.S. are in this range:

• Average Salary for Level 1 Tech: $45,000-$65,000
• Taxes, Benefits, PTO: $18,000-$26,000
• Equipment Costs: $2,000
• Software Licensing: $1,000-$4,000
• Office Space, Supplies, Furnishings, Utilities: $4,000-$10,000
• Ongoing Training: $1,000
• Total: $71,000 - $108,000

To make a realistic comparison between the cost/benefits of an internal Help Desk vs. Progent's outsourced Help Desk services, the costs of Progent's services should be weighed against the advantages. Issues to consider include:

• Progent bills Help Desk Call Center clients for service by the minute and at a discounted rate: Typical price to Progent customers for Progent's Level 1 Help Desk support start at about $18 for each user monthly. Fine-grained pricing means time utilization is essentially 100%. You are only charged for services received. Full-time in-house employees occasionally have dead time that you pay for.
• Progent offers 24x7 support: Progent's regular service coverage is 14 hours per day on weekdays. Round-the-clock service is available. In-house Help Desk Call Centers are usually open only during normal working hours. This could impede productivity if major problems occur during off hours. In addition, exfiltration threats like ransomware are typically launched over weekends when network support teams are thinly staffed.
• Progent's Help Desk scales on demand: Recruiting new internal IT employees could take weeks or months. By leveraging Progent's nationwide team of network support experts you can right size your Help Desk capacity as needed. You don't have to worry about finding replacements for people on sick leave, attracting additional IT support help to meet increased demand or to take the place of employees who leave, or cutting back your permanent in-house IT team when business slows down. You can easily adjust to business cycles peculiar to your market or responsive to the economy in general.
• Contractual responsiveness: Progent offers SLAs to ensure that support calls are dealt with in a timely manner. Internal Help Desk Call Center groups have no real equivalent of an SLA.
• Range of IT skills: Progent has been providing remote technical support for over 20 years. Progent's IT support experts are familiar with a broad range of modern and old generation technologies running in a wide variety of industries. This set of expertise enables Progent to save time and expense by delivering rapid solutions to issues that could otherwise be promoted to a higher and more costly level of support. In today's quickly evolving IT landscape, it is tough on the budget when unfamiliar products and technologies need to be mastered at your expense. In addition, Progent's expertise makes it easier to anticipate and fix budding technical problems before they are able to disrupt productivity.
• Fast access to subject matter experts: Progent's Help Desk outsourcing and co-sourcing services also allow access to Progent's group of SMEs to offer quick resolution of Level 2 and Level 3 technical issues that are outside the skill set of most Level 1 Help Desk Call Center technicians. Progent's capacity to assign the right engineer for an advanced problem can minimize the disruption caused by downtime.
• Enterprise-class secure multi-tenant ticketing and monitoring system: Progent safely shares enterprise-class service management technology that permits Progent and clients to generate and track trouble tickets, establish responsibility, follow the real-time progress of problems, record activity, and produce management analytics.
• Help Desk co-sourcing shares the workload: Progent's Co-sourced Help Desk Call Center service transparently shares service requests between your in-house IT support staff and Progent's nationwide roster of support technicians and subject matter experts. You specify how trouble tickets are distributed, but Progent usually deals with Level 1 and Level 3 issues. The Help Desk software seamlessly ticket creation, escalation, monitoring, and reporting. Co-sourcing permits your internal staff to deliver hands-on assistance when circumstances require it and at the same time enables rapid scale-up for remote help.
• Let your in-house IT support team concentrate on strategic aspects of your business: Your internal network support team understands more about your business than any external support provider. Utilizing Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing services frees these valuable human assets from being consumed by low-level support services such as configuring work-at-home routers and gives them the chance to work on marshalling technology to provide competitive advantage.

Learn More about Progent's Help Desk Outsourcing Services
To learn more about Progent's Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing services, visit Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing services. To find out signing up for Progent's Help Desk Call Center service programs, call 800-993-9400 or go to Contact Progent.