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The Cost Advantages of Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing
Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing and co-sourcing services offer substantial business benefits compared with maintaining a Help Desk staffed exclusively by in-house IT personnel. Many of the benefits of Help Desk outsourcing, such as improved computer or network uptime, obviously contribute to worker output but are not easy to evaluate in dollars and cents. Other areas, like internal salaries compared to granular billing for external Help Desk Call Center services, can be deceptive at first glance. This comparison is intended to investigate some of the key cost/benefit issues related to going with an in-house or an outsourced or co-sourced Help Desk Call Center.

If you have an internally staffed Help Desk, you may have to make a decision whether your organization ought to add people to your IT service staff or outsource/co-source Help Desk Call Center services. You could reach this juncture due to a variety of circumstances. These include:

• Business growth is overwhelming your Help Desk
• One of your Help Desk team has left
• You are starting up a new office in a different region
• Work-from-Home (WFH) users have increased Help Desk Call Center call volume and created new types of IT support issues
• Your Help Desk Call Center staff members are needed to help with operational IT initiatives

The Cost of an Internal Help Desk Call Center Employee
It's tempting but unrealistic to compare the raw salaries of in-house workers with the granular by-the-minute costs of an outsourced Help Desk group. Although costs for an internal Level 1 IT support person vary from city to city (e.g., Tupelo vs. San Francisco), most regions in the United States are in this range:

• Typical Salary for Level 1 Technician: $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

To make a fair evaluation between the business value of an in-house Help Desk vs. Progent's outside Help Desk Call Center services, the costs of Progent's services should be weighed against the advantages. Issues to consider include:

• Progent bills Help Desk customers for service by the minute and at a discount: Typical price to Progent clients for Progent's Level 1 Help Desk support begin at about $18 for each user monthly. Fine-grained billing means utilization is essentially 100%. You are only charged for services received. Full-time in-house workers invariably have dead time that you pay for.
• Progent can provide extended hours support: Progent's regular service coverage is 14 hours per day on weekdays. Round-the-clock service is optional. In-house Help Desks are usually operational only for normal working hours. This could impact productivity if serious problems occur during off hours. Also, exfiltration attacks such as ransomware are typically launched during weekends when IT support teams are thinly staffed.
• Progent's Help Desk Call Center scales easily: Recruiting new in-house IT staff could take weeks or months. By tapping into Progent's nationwide roster of network support professionals you can adjust your Help Desk capacity as needed. You don't have to worry about filling in for technicians out sick, attracting additional IT support help to handle increased demand or to replace employees who leave, or cutting back your permanent in-house IT staff when business slows down. You can quickly respond to business activity associated with your industry or responsive to the economy as a whole.
• Guaranteed responsiveness: Progent provides Service Level Agreements to make sure support requests are dealt with promptly. Internal Help Desk teams have no practical substitute for a Service Level Agreement.
• Breadth of technical skills: Progent has been delivering remote IT support for more than two deades. Progent's IT support professionals are familiar with a wide range of advanced and old generation technologies running in a wide variety of industries. This set of skills enables Progent to save time and money by providing fast solutions to problems that might otherwise be promoted to a higher and more costly level of support. In today's fast-changing IT world, it is hard on the wallet when newer technologies need to be mastered on your dime. Also, Progent's expertise makes it possible to anticipate and correct looming IT issues before they can disrupt productivity.
• Access to subject matter experts: Progent's Help Desk outsourcing services also allow access to Progent's pool of SMEs to deliver fast solutions to Level 2 and Level 3 IT issues that are outside the skill set of Level 1 Help Desk Call Center techs. Progent's ability to come up with the appropriate SME for an advanced problem can minimize costly downtime.
• Enterprise-grade secure multi-tenant ticketing and monitoring technology: Progent safely shares enterprise-class service management technology that permits Progent and clients to create and track IT trouble tickets, assign responsibility, follow the real-time progress of issues, record services performed, and generate management reports.
• Help Desk co-sourcing distributes the workload: Progent's Co-managed Help Desk service seamlessly shares service requests between your internal IT support team and Progent's pool of service techs and subject matter experts. You specify how trouble tickets are allocated, but Progent usually handles Level 1 and Level 3 tickets. The Help Desk software transparently manages creation, escalation or de-escalation, tracking, and reporting. The co-sourcing solution allows your internal staff to deliver in-person support when situations call for it and at the same time enables rapid scale-up for remote help.
• Have your internal IT support team focus on operational issues: Your in-house network service team knows more about your company than any external service organization. Utilizing Progent's Help Desk outsourcing or co-sourcing services frees these valuable resources from being consumed by low-level support services such as recovering passwords and gives them the chance to marshal technology to provide strategic advantage.

Learn More about Progent's Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing Services
To learn more about Progent's Help Desk Outsourcing services, visit Progent's Help Desk outsourcing services. To ask about how to get started with Progent's Help Desk service programs, phone 800-993-9400 or go to Contact Progent.