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The Economics of Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing or Co-sourcing
Progent's Help Desk Call Center management and co-management services deliver substantial business benefits compared with building and managing a Help Desk staffed exclusively by in-house employees. Many of the advantages of Help Desk outsourcing, like increased computer uptime, clearly contribute to productivity but are difficult to assess precisely in dollars. Other issues, like in-house salaries compared to granular charges for outsourced Help Desk services, can be misleading at first sight. This comparison is intended to investigate the major cost/benefit issues associated with going with an in-house or an outsourced Help Desk Call Center.

If you currently have an internally staffed Help Desk, you may have to make a decision whether you ought to add people to your support team or outsource/co-source Help Desk services. You could reach this point due to a number of situations. Examples include:

• Workforce expansion is swamping your Help Desk
• One of your Help Desk Call Center support staff has taken another job
• You are opening a new office in another city
• Work-from-Home (WFH) users have multiplied Help Desk call tickets and created new types of support issues
• Your Help Desk staff members are required for helping with strategic IT initiatives

The Cost of an In-House Help Desk Employee
It's natural but misleading to compare the base salaries of internal personnel with the granular by-the-minute costs of an outsourced Help Desk Call Center team. Although costs for an internal IT Help Desk person vary from state to state and city to city (e.g., Atlanta vs. New York), most areas in the U.S. are in this range:

• Typical Salary for Level 1 Technician: $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 fair evaluation between the cost efficiency of an internal Call Center 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 clients for service on a per-minute basis and at a discounted rate: Typical price to Progent customers for outsourced Level 1 Help Desk Call Center support begin at about $18 for each user monthly. Granular pricing means utilization is essentially 100%. You only pay for services received. Full-time in-house employees invariably have dead time that you pay for.
• Progent offers 24x7 support: Progent's standard service availability is 14 hours per day on weekdays. Round-the-clock service is available. Internally staffed Help Desk Call Centers are usually open only for normal working hours. This could impede productivity if major issues occur during off hours. Also, exfiltration threats such as ransomware are typically activated over weekends when network support teams are thinly staffed.
• Progent's Help Desk Call Center scales on demand: Recruiting new in-house technical employees could take weeks or months. By tapping into Progent's nationwide team of IT support professionals you can adjust your Help Desk capacity as needed. You don't have to worry about substituting for people on sick leave, hiring new technical support help to handle growing demand or to replace workers who leave, or cutting back your permanent in-house IT team if business slows. You can quickly respond to business cycles peculiar to your industry or responsive to the economy as a whole.
• Guaranteed responsiveness: Progent provides SLAs to make sure service requests are addressed promptly. Internal Help Desk Call Center teams can offer no real substitute for a Service Level Agreement.
• Breadth of IT expertise: Progent has been providing online technical support for over two deades. Progent's IT support professionals are familiar with a wide range of current and legacy technologies deployed in a wide variety of industries. This range of skills enables Progent to save time and money by providing rapid fixes to issues that might otherwise be promoted to a higher and more costly support level. In our quickly evolving IT world, it is tough on the budget when newer technologies need to be learned at your expense. In addition, Progent's expertise makes it possible to anticipate and fix looming IT problems before they are able to disrupt workflow.
• Fast access to subject matter experts: Progent's Help Desk outsourcing and co-sourcing services also allow fast access to Progent's team of SMEs to deliver quick resolution of Level 2 and Level 3 IT issues that are beyond the scope of most Level 1 Help Desk Call Center techs. Progent's capacity to come up with the appropriate engineer for a high-level issue can minimize costly downtime.
• Enterprise-class multi-tenant ticketing and monitoring system: Progent securely shares enterprise-class service management technology that allows Progent and customers to generate and track trouble tickets, establish responsibility, follow the real-time status of issues, document activity, and produce management reports.
• Help Desk co-management shares the work: Progent's Co-managed Help Desk Call Center service transparently shares service requests between a client's in-house IT support staff and Progent's pool of service technicians 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 Call Center software transparently manages generation, escalation or de-escalation, tracking, and reporting. The co-sourcing solution allows your internal techs to deliver in-person assistance when situations call for it and at the same time facilitates fast scale-up for remote help.
• Have your in-house network support group concentrate on strategic aspects of your business: Your internal network service group understands more about your company than any outside service organization. Utilizing Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing services frees these precious human assets from being consumed by low-level troubleshooting like recovering passwords and gives them the opportunity to work on marshalling technology to deliver strategic advantage.

Learn More about Progent's Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing and Co-sourcing Services
To learn 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 ask about signing up for Progent's Help Desk service programs, call 800-993-9400 or go to Contact Progent.