The Cost/Benefits of Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing
Progent's Help Desk outsourcing and co-sourcing services offer substantial business benefits in comparison to maintaining a Help Desk Call Center run exclusively by internal IT personnel. Some of the benefits of outsourcing, like improved computer or network availability, clearly contribute to worker output but are difficult to evaluate in dollars and cents. Other areas, like internal salaries vs. granular charges for external Help Desk services, can be deceptive at first sight. This discussion will investigate the key cost/benefit issues associated with going with an in-house or an outsourced or co-sourced Help Desk.
If you currently have an in-house Help Desk Call Center, you may have to decide whether you should add people to your support staff or outsource Help Desk Call Center services. You could arrive at this juncture due to a number of situations. Examples include:
- Business expansion is swamping your Help Desk Call Center
- One of your Help Desk Call Center team has left
- You are starting up an additional office in a different city
- Work-from-Home (WFH) users have increased Help Desk Call Center call tickets and introduced different sorts of support issues
- Your Help Desk team members are more valuable helping with operational IT initiatives
Any of these situations might cause serious strain on your Help Desk and as a consequence disrupt worker productivity. If several of these events occur simultaneously, your IT management group could be in a lot of hurt.
The Cost of an Internal Help Desk Call Center Employee
It's tempting but misleading to compare the raw salaries of internal workers with the granular per-minute charges of an outside Help Desk Call Center group. Although typical costs for an in-house IT Help Desk person differ from state to state and city to city (e.g., Tupelo vs. San Francisco), most areas in the United States fall into this range:
- Typical Base 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 Training: $1,000
- Total: $71,000 - $108,000
As with any salaried, permanent worker, the true yearly cost of a Help Desk Level 1 support person can be over 50% beyond the base salary. These expenses do not factor in one-time costs for referral fees, interviews, onboarding, or job training. They also fail to take into account the expense of onboarding new employees who quickly quit.
In order to make a realistic comparison between the cost/benefits of an internal Help Desk vs. Progent's external Help Desk Call Center services, the costs of Progent's services should be looked at against the benefits. Items to consider include:
- Progent bills Help Desk customers for service on a per-minute basis and at a discounted rate: Typical price to Progent clients for Progent's Level 1 Help Desk Call Center support services begin at around $18 for each user per month. Granular billing means utilization is virtually 100%. You only pay for services delivered. Salaried internal workers occasionally have dead time and the meter is always running.
- Progent offers extended hours support: Progent's regular service coverage is 14 hours on weekdays. Round-the-clock service programs are optional. Internally staffed Help Desks are usually operational only for regular working hours. This could impede productivity if serious issues occur during off hours. In addition, exfiltration attacks such as ransomware are typically launched over weekends when network support groups are thinly staffed.
- Progent's Help Desk Call Center scales on demand: Hiring new internal IT employees could take weeks or months. By leveraging Progent's nationwide roster of IT support experts you can adjust your Help Desk capacity as needed. You don't have to worry about finding replacements for technicians on sick leave, attracting new IT support help to handle increased demand or to take the place of workers who leave, or trimming your permanent internal IT team if business slows down. You can easily respond to business activity inherent to your industry or responsive to the economy in general.
- Guaranteed responsiveness: Progent offers Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure that support requests are responded to quickly. In-house Help Desk groups can offer no real equivalent of an SLA.
- Breadth of technical skills: Progent has been delivering remote IT support for over 20 years. Progent's IT support professionals are steeped in a wide range of current and old generation technologies deployed in a wide variety of industries. This set of expertise allows Progent to save time and money by delivering fast solutions to problems that might otherwise be promoted to a higher and more pricey support level. In today's quickly evolving IT landscape, it is hard on the budget when unfamiliar products and technologies have to be learned on your dime. In addition, Progent's experience makes it easier to foresee and correct budding IT issues before they are able to impact productivity.
- Fast access to subject matter experts: Progent's Help Desk outsourcing services also allow access to Progent's group of SMEs to deliver quick resolution of Level 2 and Level 3 IT problems that are beyond the skill set of most Level 1 Help Desk technicians. Progent's ability to assign the right SME for an advanced problem can reduce the disruption caused by downtime.
- Enterprise-grade multi-tenant ticketing and tracking system: Progent safely shares enterprise-grade service automation technology that permits Progent and clients to create and track IT trouble tickets, assign responsibility, follow the status of problems, record activity, and generate management reports.
- Help Desk co-management distributes the workload: Progent's Co-sourced Help Desk Call Center service transparently shares service requests between a client's in-house IT staff and Progent's group of support technicians and subject matter experts. You specify how trouble tickets are distributed, but Progent typically deals with Level 1 and Level 3 tickets. The Help Desk Call Center software transparently manages creation, escalation or de-escalation, monitoring, and reporting. The co-sourcing model permits your in-house staff to provide hands-on assistance when circumstances require it and at the same time facilitates fast scale-up for remote support.
- Have your in-house IT service team focus on strategic issues: Your in-house network service group knows more about your business than any outside support organization. Using Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing or co-sourcing services liberates these valuable human assets from being consumed by Level 1 troubleshooting like configuring work-at-home routers and gives them the chance to work on marshalling technology to deliver strategic advantage.
In the last analysis, the top benefit of Progent's Help Desk Outsourcing service is the minimization of computer downtime. Whether for one user or a whole organization, waiting for the right IT resolution is an expensive activity.
Find Out More about Progent's Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing and Co-sourcing Services
To find out more about Progent's Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing and Co-sourcing services, see Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing and co-sourcing services. To find out how to get started with Progent's Help Desk Call Center service programs, call 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.