Computer Network Outsourcing for Small Businesses
Co-managed Help Desk Call Center Solutions
Progent's Shared Service Desk
Progent's Shared Help Desk service enables your IT group to split responsibilities for Service Desk support seamlessly between your internal network support resources and Progent's nationwide pool of certified IT service engineers and subject matter experts. Progent's Shared Service Desk is a collaborative IT service system built around ConnectWise Manage, the industry-leading Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool for managing IT support requests, issuing tickets, assigning responsibility, monitoring status, and producing management reports. The price for Level 1 IT support for Progent's Co-managed Help Desk service averages under $18/user/month.
Progent's Co-managed Service Desk provides a seamless extension of your in-house network support team. End user interaction with the Service Desk, delivery of support services, escalation, trouble ticket generation and updates, efficiency measurement, and maintenance of the service database are consistent regardless of whether incidents are resolved by your core support resources, by Progent's team, or both. All end-user service requests are triaged as Level 1, 2 or 3 incidents. Progent focuses on the service levels you select (typically Levels 1 and 3). Original support requests are assigned either to your internal network support group or to Progent's Technical Response Center, based on your preferences. Level 2 or 3 tickets can be referred to Progent's Experts Team of subject matter experts (SMEs). The assignment process is seamless for your end users. You have unrestricted versatility to extend or reduce your share of support activity as circumstances demand. Progent provides startup installation and onboarding of the professional services automation (PSA) software as well as documentation, validation and training.
Progent's Technical Response Center
Progent's Technical Response Center has been providing remote technical assistance for more than two decades and serves active customers in every state in the U.S. (see Progent's customer testimonials.) The TRC maintains the pool of certified computer experts who can handle Level 1 tickets, which represent the bulk of Service Desk service requests. The TRC, like Progent's Experts Team, uses the ConnectWise Manage professional services automation (PSA) platform to automate ticketing, tracking, ownership delegation, escalation and reporting. This prevents problems from being ignored and gives clients clear visibility of all services provided. The Technical Response Center is committed to 90% in-person answer rate and enables Progent's Shared Service Desk Services to include a 60-minute service-level agreement (SLA). Service hours are 5am to 7pm Pacific Time on standard business days. Extended support hours and on-premises help are offered at additional cost. To learn more about Progent's TRC, refer to The TRC Customer Commitment.
Service Levels
Progent provides three levels of online technical help, which correspond to industry-standard Tier 1 to Tier 3 service. You can define which service levels will be provided exclusively or in part by Progent's support team and your internal service group. The size and scope of Progent's roster of subject matter experts enables fast and efficient ticket escalation and makes it possible to rely on Progent as a one-stop source for the majority of IT issues at any Tier. In addition, Progent's practice of knowledge transfer permits key support issues to move from higher to lower Tiers as solution techniques become recorded and standardized so they can be handled by less skilled and less expensive support staff.
Support levels are described as:
- Level 1 Support: Categorizes Help Desk requests and delivers basic technical help and debugging, such as password resets, printer set up, break/fix procedures, ticket routing and promotion to Level 2 and Level 3 support. A Level 1 tech gathers and analyzes information about the user's issue and determines the best way to resolve the problem. Level 1 service can also provide support for familiar Level 2 or Level 3 issues where solutions have already been recorded.
- Level 2 Support: Primarily handles break/fix, configuration problems, debugging, software installations, and hardware fixes including on-premises repair or coordinating depot services. Level 2 support deals with escalated issues that Level 1 personnel are not equipped to resolve. Level 2 service can sometimes evolve to Level 3, depending on the issue and the manner the Service Desk operates.
- Level 3 Support: Troubleshooting, configuration, DBA, and migrations for OS and applications servers, hybrid networks, email, collaboration, and various integration issues. In addition to possessing the capability to find fixes to new issues, a Level 3 consultant usually has the most real-world expertise.
A common example of a trouble ticket lifecycle is the situation where you want Progent's Technical Response Center to triage all service calls. In this scenario, Progent may be responsible for working directly with all the Level 1 desktop issues your users report. Progent can promote the remaining support requests to your internal network support staff. Your internal network support personnel would then take on the Level 2 requests they have the knowledge and availability to resolve and promote any remaining requests to Progent's Level 3 Experts Team.
This particular deployment of Progent's Shared Help Desk Service has a four-stage ticket lifecycle:
- Your employees initiate requests for support through the online service portal, a dedicated telephone number, or simply by sending an email to a designated email address. This automatically launches an open request in the ticket system.
- Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC) gets the open request and determines whether it will be handles or forwarded to your internal Help Desk.
- Your Help Desk receives the promoted ticket request and decides the best means to resolve the problem. If needed, your Service Desk can forward the open request back to Progent for resolution by Progent's Experts Team.
- Progent gets the revised trouble ticket request, selects the best suited SME from the Experts Team, and assigns the chosen SME to co-operate with your support staff until the issue is fixed or closed.
Key Features of Progent's Service Desk
Top aspects of Progent's Co-managed Service Desk offerings include:
- Pooled Level 1 help from Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC) team
- Desktop online help provided 5 days a week, 5am-7pm PST, 60 Minute SLA
- Special per-hour rate and one-minute granularity for Tier 1 support for clients
- Average price of Level 1 service is about $18/user/month
- Level 2 and Level 3 help from Progent SME provided as an option at Progent's standard consulting rates
- De-escalation allows issues that initially require Level 2 or Level 3 support to migrate to a lower, less costly Tier once solutions are documented
- StreamlineIT provides a complete version of ConnectWise service desk software with multi-tenant security
Progent's Co-managed Service Desk support program is designed to provide a flexible, collaborative call center solution for mid-size businesses. Details of these services, with Progent providing Level 1 support, include:
- Available only in the United States and US territories
- Initial setup fee based on complexity of the deployment
- Starting day one, you are assigned by Progent a Technical Resource Center (TRC) Coordinator and a TRC Service Lead to resource, assign and communicate with your service group and your clients. Progent's TRC Service Lead will work closely with you to develop a What Goes Where document to help transparently escalate to your service group or de-escalate back to Progent's support engineers.
- Live Answer of inbound support calls to Progent Technical Response Center (TRC) with a goal of 90% Live Answer of all requests
- After determining whether server or networking assistance is needed, some service requests will be passed to Level 2 or Level 3 support
- All support that needs Level 2 or Level 3 service will be handled by a Progent consultant pending client authorization
- 1 hour SLA for Level 1 desktop support in most cases
- Level 1 Support is for your client users and applies to Windows-based systems and Apple devices
- Progent Level 2 or 3 support will be charged at regular hourly consulting rates
- Progent will provide skilled personnel - Technical Response Center desktop specialists during standard hours, Level 2 and Level 3 as needed
- Progent will provide a phone number and email mailbox for incoming support requests
- Free Remote Control agent with screen sharing for efficient IT troubleshooting
- Free ProSight IT Asset Management system for cloud-based network documentation management
- All Level 1 remote support is charged at a special hourly rate with per-minute granularity
- All Level 1 support will be performed online, no onsite support included
- All onsite work will be billed at standard hourly consulting rates
- All on-premises support will have an additional fixed fee plus any specific travel costs
- All travel cost estimates will be provided and require customer approval before work or travel will be undertaken
- Contracted projects and distinct Statements of Work will include their individual estimates and costs defined and will be performed only after approval by client
Progent's phased onboarding process allows your business to move seamlessly to a co-managed Service Desk and an advanced trouble ticket and reporting system. Major steps in the deployment process for Progent's Co-managed Service Desk include:
First Steps
- Create your personalized Help Desk environment, including your internal support group, service locations, and user data
- Progent's consultants will work with your support team to review current inbound service calls
- Set up your incoming help request service to include a mailbox, software agents, and a dedicated telephone number
- Progent provides ticket management training for your support team
- Jointly create core workflow and escalation procedures
- Integrate all your groups and assets that will deliver support
- Develop the introduction description and promotion of the new Service Desk solution
- Designate a defined location or small clusters of users to onboard first
- Integrate additional users into the solution at determined intervals
- Study reports and system configuration for efficient information and workflow
- Add additional reports or fields required to enhance the identification or tracking of frequently seen issues
- Identify pivotal data that could allow a better success rate for Level 1 service requests
- All clients have been introduced to the service system and can connect to it
- All necessary user and equipment data is entered into the service system
- You are able to transfer and administer tickets transparently between your internal team and Progent
- You are able to track support performance
Progent's Shared Help Desk service delivers a range of benefits that allow you to provide users rapid and effective IT support services while simultaneously cutting expenses and reducing management burden. Benefits of Progent's Shared Service Desk include:
- Retain complete control over your IT support issues: you determine what tickets are forwarded to Progent's service group or taken care of by your in-house service staff.
- Immediate access to additional IT service professionals when and if you need them: Progent's professional services automation (PSA) software automatically routes internal trouble tickets or allows you manually forward to Progent's TRC.
- Efficiency: Progent's IT support experts will review your current incoming service requests and propose missing information that would promote a higher resolution rate for common desktop requests. Progent's consultants can also help you with tag management to expedite problem resolution.
- Seamlessness: Progent's Co-managed Help Desk acts as a seamless supplement to your in-house Call Center with centralized ticketing and reporting so nothing drops between the cracks.
- Contented employees: Users have the ability to follow the progress of their IT service requests rapidly and easily.
- Management insight: You benefit from the measurements, accountability, and performance monitoring of an advanced PSA platform to assist your organization to build a custom-designed Help Desk experience that delivers maximum business value.
- Focus on your core business initiatives, not IT service requests and disgruntled end-users: Your network managers escape being saddled with handling common support calls.
Although supporting your own fully-staffed local IT team can be expensive from the budgetary perspective, many organizations prefer that approach because it offers them more flexibility with their network management. Yet did you realize that your business can continue to reap the advantages of a managed services firm using the shared IT service approach. The co-managed model allows your company to stay in command over your system infrastructure while reinforcing your local IT group easily and economically.
For details, download our white paper: Is co-managed IT a good idea? (PDF - 632 KB).
Download Progent's Co-managed Service Desk Datasheet
To view a one-page datasheet in PDF format describing Progent's Co-managed Help Desk, click:
Progent's Shared Help Desk Datasheet. (PDF - 108 KB)
Related Services
Progent has packaged the ProSight suite of remote monitoring and management (RMM) services to streamline critical processes associated with IT administration, security and maintenance. Any of these services can be used with Progent's Shared Help Desk service by deploying agent apps on machines to be tracked and managed. Alerts generated by these agents can be routed directly to Progent's Technical Response Center, managed through the trouble ticket and tracking system, and triaged for Level 1, 2 or 3 support.
Samples of ProSight Remote Monitoring and Management packages include:
- ProSight Email Guard: Email Content Filtering, Spam Blocking and Data Leakage Defense:
ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam and virus filtering and email encryption service that uses the technology of leading data security vendors to provide centralized control and comprehensive security for your inbound and outbound email. The powerful structure of Email Guard combines cloud-based filtering with an on-premises security gateway appliance to offer complete defense against spam, viruses, Dos Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks, and other email-based threats. Email Guard's cloud filter acts as a preliminary barricade and keeps most unwanted email from making it to your network firewall. This decreases your exposure to inbound threats and conserves system bandwidth and storage. Email Guard's onsite gateway appliance provides a further level of inspection for incoming email. For outgoing email, the local security gateway provides AV and anti-spam filtering, DLP, and email encryption. The local security gateway can also assist Microsoft Exchange Server to track and protect internal email traffic that originates and ends inside your corporate firewall. For more details, visit ProSight Email Guard spam and content filtering.
- ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM): Behavior-based Threat Analysis and Ransomware Defense:
ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) is an endpoint protection (EPP) solution that utilizes cutting edge behavior analysis technology from SentinelOne to defend physical and virtual endpoints against modern malware attacks like ransomware and email phishing, which easily get by traditional signature-matching anti-virus tools. ProSight Active Security Monitoring protects local and cloud resources and provides a single platform to automate the entire threat progression including blocking, identification, mitigation, remediation, and forensics. Key features include single-click rollback using Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service and automatic network-wide immunization against newly discovered attacks. Progent is a SentinelOne Partner, dealer, and integrator. Find out more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) next-generation endpoint protection and ransomware defense with SentinelOne technology.
- ProSight Data Protection Services: Cloud-based Backup and Disaster Recovery:
Progent has worked with advanced backup product companies to create ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS), a portfolio of subscription-based management offerings that deliver backup-as-a-service (BaaS). All ProSight DPS services automate and track your data backup operations and allow transparent backup and rapid restoration of vital files, applications, system images, and VMs. ProSight DPS helps you protect against data loss resulting from hardware breakdown, natural disasters, fire, cyber attacks such as ransomware, human mistakes, ill-intentioned employees, or software bugs. Managed services available in the ProSight DPS family include ProSight Altaro VM Backup, ProSight 365 Total Backup (formerly Altaro Office 365 Backup), ProSight DPS ECHO Backup based on Barracuda dedicated storage, and ProSight DPS MSP360 Hybrid Backup. Your Progent service representative can help you to identify which of these fully managed backup services are best suited for your IT environment.
- Patch Management: Software/Firmware Update Management Services:
Progent's managed services for patch management provide businesses of all sizes a flexible and affordable solution for assessing, validating, scheduling, implementing, and documenting updates to your dynamic information system. Besides maximizing the protection and functionality of your computer environment, Progent's software/firmware update management services permit your in-house IT staff to concentrate on line-of-business initiatives and activities that derive the highest business value from your network. Read more about Progent's software/firmware update management support services.
- ProSight Duo Multi-Factor Authentication: Identity Validation, Endpoint Remediation, and Protected Single Sign-on:
Progent's Duo MFA managed services utilize Cisco's Duo cloud technology to defend against stolen passwords by using two-factor authentication (2FA). Duo supports one-tap identity confirmation on Apple iOS, Google Android, and other personal devices. With Duo 2FA, whenever you sign into a protected online account and give your password you are asked to verify who you are via a device that only you have and that uses a different network channel. A wide range of devices can be utilized for this added form of ID validation including an iPhone or Android or wearable, a hardware/software token, a landline phone, etc. You may register multiple validation devices. To find out more about Duo identity validation services, visit Duo MFA two-factor authentication (2FA) services.
As a Microsoft Gold-Certified Partner, Progent offers your users fast and reliable access to a seasoned Service Desk team ready to deliver IT support. Progent has years of background delivering remote support for networks built on Microsoft products. Progent's focus is on giving the Help Desk a positive image as a major contributor to your company's success. Progent tries to resolve rather than merely track issues, and Progent's goal for long-term customers is to fix at least 80% of Call Desk support issues on the first call. First-call success is a key driver in controlling Service Desk expenses, enhancing the image of the IT staff overall and the Help Desk in particular, and raising end-user productivity.
Get Started with Progent's Shared Network Help Desk Services
To find out more about Progent's Shared Network Help Desk Services, call
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