Computer Network Outsourcing for Midsize Businesses

Progent's Shared Help Desk Service
Progent's Shared Service Desk is designed for organizations with 50 to 500 users and permits your IT team to split responsibilities for support services seamlessly between your in-house network support staff and Progent's extensive pool of certified IT support technicians, engineers and subject matter experts. Progent's Shared Help Desk service is a joint IT service system based on the leading shared PSA platform for administering IT support calls, issuing trouble tickets, assigning responsibility, monitoring status, and generating management reports.

Progent's Shared Help Desk Service offers a seamless extension of your corporate IT support team. Client interaction with the Help Desk, delivery of support, problem escalation, ticket generation and updates, performance measurement, and maintenance of the service database are cohesive regardless of whether issues are resolved by your in-house IT support group, by Progent, or a mix of the two. All end-user support requests are ranked as Level 1, 2 or 3 issues. Progent focuses on the service levels you assign (typically Levels 1 and 3). Original support requests are routed to your internal network support organization or to Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC), depending on your requirements. Level 2 or 3 issues can be escalated to Progent's Experts Team of subject matter experts (SMEs). The escalation activity is transparent to your end users. Your business has unrestricted flexibility to extend or reduce your share of support work as needed. Progent provides initial installation and provisioning of the professional services PSA software as well as workflow documentation, validation and training.

Progent's Technical Response Center
Progent's Technical Response Center has been delivering remote technical assistance for over twenty years and serves active clients in every state in the U.S. (see Progent's customer testimonials.) The Technical Response Center provides the team of certified desktop technicians who can resolve Level 1 issues, which represent the majority of Help Desk support calls. The TRC, like Progent's Experts Team, uses the leading professional services automation software platform to streamline ticketing, status tracking, responsibility delegation, problem escalation and management reporting. This keeps problems from being overlooked and gives users clear understanding about all support services provided. The TRC targets 90% live answer performance and allows Progent's Shared Service Desk program to include a 60-minute service-level agreement (SLA). Support times are 5am to 6pm PST on normal business days. Extended support times and onsite support are offered at additional cost. To learn more about the TRC, refer to The TRC Customer Commitment.

Definition of Service Levels
Progent provides three levels of online technical help, which are equivalent to industry-recognized Tier 1 to Tier 3 service. You can define which support levels will be provided wholly or shared by Progent and your in-house staff. The depth and scope of Progent's team of SMEs enables fast and efficient ticket escalation and permits you to count on Progent as a single source for the majority of support issues at any Tier. Also, Progent's provision of knowledge transfer allows important support problems to migrate from higher to lower levels as solution workflows become documented and normalized so they can be performed by less knowledgeable and lower-cost service staff.

Support levels are described as:

• Level 1 Support: Filters Service Desk calls and delivers basic IT support and troubleshooting, such as password issues, printer configurations, break/fix procedures, ticket assignment 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 support can also provide support for identified Level 2 or 3 issues where solutions have already been recorded.
• Level 2 Support: Primarily handles break/fix, setup issues, debugging, software installations, and hardware repair including on-premises repair or orchestrating depot support. Level 2 support deals with escalated issues that Level 1 support is not qualified to handle. Level 2 will sometimes evolve to Level 3, depending on the issue and the way the Help Desk operates.
• Level 3 Support: Troubleshooting, setup, DBA, and migrations for OS and applications servers, cloud integration, messaging, collaboration, and various infrastructure issues. Besides having the ability to deploy solutions to new problems, a Level 3 consultant usually has the most real-world expertise.

This particular implementation of Progent's Shared Help Desk Service has a four-phase trouble ticket lifecycle:

1. Your users generate requests for support through the online support, an 800 phone number, or simply by sending a message to a designated email address. This automatically becomes an open request in the trouble ticket system.
2. Progent's Technical Response Center gets the ticket request and decides if it will be handles or escalated to your in-house Help Desk.
3. Your Help Desk gets the escalated open request and decides the best way to service the issue. If necessary, your Service Desk can forward the ticket request back to Progent for assignment to Progent's Experts Team.
4. Progent receives the updated trouble ticket request, selects the best suited subject matter exert from the Experts Team, and tasks the designated SME to co-operate with your support team until the problem is solved or closed.

Highlights of Progent's Help Desk Service
Top aspects of Progent's Shared Help Desk offerings include:

• Pooled Level 1 support from Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC) team
• Level 1 online support provided 5 days a week, 5am-6pm Pacific Time, 60 Minute SLA
• Discounted hourly support rate and per-minute granularity for Level 1 support for users
• Level 2 and Level 3 help from Progent SME available as an option at Progent's standard consulting rates
• De-escalation permits problems that initially call for Level 2 or 3 support to drop to a lower, less costly Tier thanks to thorough and easily accessible documentation.

• Available only in the United States and US territories
• One-time startup charge dependent on complexity of the deployment
• Live Answer of inbound service requests to Progent Technical Response Center with a target of 90% Live Answer of all calls
• After deciding whether server or networking assistance is needed, some requests will be escalated to Level 2 or Level 3 support
• All support requiring Level 2 or Level 3 service will be worked on by a Progent expert pending customer authorization
• 1 hour SLA for Level 1 desktop support in most cases
• Level 1 Support is for users and applies to Windows-powered systems and Apple systems
• Progent Level 2 or Level 3 support will be provided at standard hourly consulting prices
• Progent will provide skilled resources - Technical Response Center (TRC) desktop specialists during standard hours, Level 2 and 3 as required
• Progent will dedicate a toll-free phone number and email mailbox for incoming service requests
• Free Remote Control app with screen sharing for efficient IT troubleshooting
• Free ProSight IT Asset Management solution for IT documentation management
• All Level 1 remote support is billed at a discounted hourly rate
• All Level 1 service will be done remotely, no on-premises work included
• All on-premises work is billed at regular hourly consulting rates
• All onsite support will have an additional fixed fee as well as any specific travel expenses
• All travel expense projections will be provided and need customer approval before support services or travel will be undertaken
• Contracted projects and separate Statements of Work (SoWs) will have their individual estimates and costs stipulated and will be performed only following authorization by customer

Initial Phase

• Create your custom Help Desk experience, including your internal team, locations, and user data
• Progent's consultants will work with your service group to review current incoming support calls
• Set up your inbound support request system to include a mailbox, software agents, and a toll-free phone number

• Progent provides ticket management education for your service group
• Jointly define basic workflow and escalation procedures
• Add all your groups and assets that will deliver support services
• Create the roll-out description and selling of the new Service Desk solution
• Pick a specific location or manageably-sized groups to onboard initially
• Bring additional users into the solution at determined intervals

• Review reports and system configuration for proper data and processes
• Add any reports or fields needed to improve the detection or tracking of common issues
• Identify missing data that could enable a higher resolution percentage for Level 1 support calls

• All users have been exposed to the support system and can access it
• All necessary user and hardware information is populated in the service system
• You can exchange and administer trouble tickets smoothly between your in-house team and Progent
• You can monitor service performance and trends

• Keep total control over your IT service issues: you choose what tickets are forwarded to Progent's service group or taken care of by your in-house service staff.
• Immediate access to supplemental IT support experts when you require them: Progent's professional services automation software programmatically distributes internal tickets or permits you manually forward to Progent's TRC.
• Efficiency: Progent's IT support experts will review your incoming support requests and identify missing data that would allow a higher success rate for typical Level 1 requests. Progent's IT support experts can also help you to improve tag creation to speed up problem resolution.
• Seamlessness: Progent's Shared Help Desk works as a virtual extension of your internal Help Desk with centralized ticketing and reporting so no ticket drops through the cracks.
• Contented employees: End users can follow the progress of their IT service requests rapidly and easily.
• Management analytics: You have the metrics, accountability, and performance reporting of a modern PSA platform to assist your organization to build a custom Call Center experience that delivers top business value.
• Focus on your strategic business activities, not IT support calls and unhappy users: Your IT management personnel avoid being bogged down handling ordinary support requests.

For details, see our white paper: Is co-managed IT a good idea? (PDF - 632 KB).

Download Progent's Co-managed Help Desk Datasheet
To view a one-page datasheet in PDF format describing Progent's Shared Service Desk, see:
Progent's Shared Help Desk Datasheet. (PDF - 108 KB)

Related Services
Progent has packaged the ProSight family of remote monitoring and management (RMM) services to streamline critical processes associated with IT administration, cybersecurity and upkeep. Any of these services can be integrated with Progent's Shared Call Desk service by deploying agent software on machines to be tracked and managed. Alerts sent by these software agents can be routed automatically to Progent's Technical Response Center, managed via the trouble ticket and tracking platform, and triaged for Level 1, 2 or 3 support.

Samples of ProSight Remote Monitoring and Management services include:

• ProSight Email Guard: Email Content Filtering, Spam Blocking and Data Leakage Protection:
  ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam filtering and email encryption service that uses the infrastructure of top data security companies to deliver web-based management and comprehensive protection for all your inbound and outbound email. The powerful structure of Progent's Email Guard managed service combines cloud-based filtering with an on-premises security gateway appliance to offer advanced protection against spam, viruses, Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks, and other email-borne malware. The cloud filter serves as a preliminary barricade and keeps most threats from reaching your network firewall. This reduces your exposure to inbound threats and saves system bandwidth and storage. Email Guard's on-premises gateway device adds a further layer of inspection for inbound email. For outbound email, the local security gateway offers anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, policy-based Data Loss Prevention, and email encryption. The on-premises security gateway can also assist Microsoft Exchange Server to monitor and protect internal email that stays inside your security perimeter. For more details, see ProSight Email Guard spam filtering and data leakage protection.

• ProSight Active Security Monitoring: Behavior-based Threat Scanning and Ransomware Protection:
  Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) is an endpoint protection solution that incorporates next generation behavior analysis tools to defend physical and virtual endpoint devices against new malware attacks like ransomware and email phishing, which easily evade traditional signature-based AV tools. ProSight Active Security Monitoring protects on-premises and cloud-based resources and provides a single platform to automate the entire threat lifecycle including blocking, identification, mitigation, cleanup, and post-attack forensics. Key capabilities include single-click rollback using Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service and automatic network-wide immunization against new threats. Learn more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring endpoint protection and ransomware defense.

• ProSight Data Protection Services: Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery:
  ProSight Data Protection Services from Progent provide small and mid-sized organizations a low-cost and fully managed solution for reliable backup/disaster recovery (BDR). Available at a fixed monthly price, ProSight Data Protection Services automates your backup processes and enables rapid recovery of vital files, applications and VMs that have become unavailable or damaged as a result of component failures, software glitches, disasters, human error, or malicious attacks like ransomware. ProSight DPS can help you protect, recover and restore files, folders, applications, system images, as well as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware virtual machine images. Important data can be backed up on the cloud, to an on-promises device, or mirrored to both. Progent's BDR consultants can provide advanced expertise to configure ProSight Data Protection Services to to comply with government and industry regulatory standards like HIPAA, FIRPA, PCI and Safe Harbor and, when necessary, can assist you to recover your business-critical data. Find out more about ProSight Data Protection Services Managed Cloud Backup.