Computer Network Support for Mid-size Businesses

The Economics of Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing or Co-sourcing
Progent's Help Desk outsourcing services offer significant business benefits in comparison to going it alone with a Help Desk staffed exclusively by in-house IT personnel. Many of the benefits of Help Desk outsourcing, such as increased computer uptime, obviously contribute to productivity but are not easy to assess precisely in dollars. Other areas, like internal salaries compared to per-minute charges for outsourced Help Desk Call Center support, can be misleading at first. This discussion will investigate some of the major cost issues associated with going with an in-house or an outsourced Help Desk.

If you have an in-house Help Desk Call Center, you may have to make a decision whether you ought to expand your support group or outsource/co-source Help Desk services. You could arrive at this point due to a number of common circumstances. These include:

• Business growth is overwhelming your Help Desk Call Center
• A member of your Help Desk team has left
• You are opening an additional branch in another region
• Work-from-Home employees have increased Help Desk Call Center call volume and introduced different types of IT support problems
• Your Help Desk staff members are needed to help with operational IT projects

The Cost of an Internal Help Desk Employee
It's natural but misleading to compare the base 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 state to state and city to city (e.g., Atlanta vs. New York), most regions in the U.S. fall into this range:

• Typical Salary for Level 1 Tech: $45,000-$65,000
• Taxes, Benefits, Paid Time Off: $18,000-$26,000
• Hardware Costs: $2,000
• Software: $1,000-$4,000
• Office Space, Supplies, Furnishings, Utilities: $4,000-$10,000
• Ongoing Education: $1,000
• Total: $71,000 - $108,000

To make a realistic evaluation between the business value of an internal Call Center vs. Progent's outsourced Help Desk services, the costs of Progent's services should be weighed against the benefits. Issues to take into account include:

• Progent bills Help Desk clients for service by the minute and at a discount: Typical price to Progent clients for Progent's Level 1 Help Desk support start at around $18 per user monthly. Fine-grained pricing means time utilization is essentially 100%. You only pay for services delivered. Full-time in-house employees invariably encounter dead time that you pay for.
• Progent offers extended hours support: Progent's standard service coverage is 14 hours per day on weekdays. 24x7 service programs are optional. In-house Help Desk Call Centers are typically open only for normal working hours. This can impede productivity if serious problems occur during off hours. Also, exfiltration attacks like ransomware are commonly launched over weekends when network support teams are thinly staffed.
• Progent's Help Desk scales easily: Recruiting new in-house technical staff could take months. By leveraging Progent's nationwide roster of technical support professionals you can adjust your Help Desk capacity as needed. You don't have to fret about finding replacements for people out sick, attracting additional IT support staff to handle growing demand or to replace employees who leave, or cutting back your permanent internal IT team in case business slows down. You can rapidly adjust to business activity associated with your market or reflective of the economy in general.
• Contractual responsiveness: Progent offers Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure that service requests are responded to in a timely manner. In-house Help Desk groups can offer no real substitute for an SLA.
• Breadth of technical skills: Progent has been delivering online technical support for more than 20 years. Progent's technical support professionals are steeped in a broad range of modern as well as legacy technologies deployed in a wide variety of industries. This range of skills allows Progent to save time and money by delivering fast fixes to problems that might otherwise be promoted to a higher and more pricey support level. In our quickly evolving IT landscape, it is hard on the wallet when newer technologies have to be mastered on your dime. In addition, Progent's expertise makes it possible to foresee and correct emerging IT problems before they are able to disrupt productivity.
• Access to subject matter experts: Progent's Help Desk outsourcing services also provide fast access to Progent's roster of subject matter experts to offer fast solutions to 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 come up with the appropriate engineer for an advanced issue can minimize the disruption caused by downtime.
• Enterprise-class multi-tenant ticketing and tracking system: Progent safely shares enterprise-class service management technology that allows Progent and clients to create and monitor IT trouble tickets, assign responsibility, show the status of problems, record activity, and generate management reports.
• Help Desk Call Center co-management distributes the work: Progent's Co-sourced Help Desk Call Center service transparently shares service calls between your internal IT team and Progent's nationwide pool of support techs and subject matter experts. You select the way trouble tickets are distributed, but Progent usually handles Level 1 and Level 3 tickets. The Help Desk software seamlessly ticket generation, escalation or de-escalation, tracking, and management reporting. Co-sourcing allows your in-house staff to deliver in-person support when situations require it and also facilitates on-demand expansion for online support.
• Have your internal network support team focus on strategic aspects of your business: Your internal IT service group knows more about your company than any external support provider. Utilizing Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing or co-sourcing services frees these precious resources from being consumed by low-level troubleshooting such as configuring work-at-home routers and gives them the chance to work on marshalling technology to provide competitive advantage.

Find Out More about Progent's Help Desk Outsourcing Services
To find out more about Progent's Help Desk Outsourcing services, see Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing and co-sourcing services. To learn signing up for Progent's Help Desk Call Center services, call 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.