The Cost Advantages of Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing or Co-sourcing
Progent's Help Desk outsourcing services deliver significant business value in comparison to maintaining a Help Desk staffed exclusively by internal IT personnel. Many of the advantages of Help Desk outsourcing, like increased computer or network availability, clearly improve productivity but are not easy to assess precisely in dollars and cents. Other issues, like internal salaries compared to per-minute billing for external Help Desk Call Center support, can be deceptive at first. This comparison is intended to clarify some of the major cost/benefit issues associated with selecting an internal or an outsourced Help Desk Call Center.

If you have an in-house Help Desk Call Center, you may need 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 owing to a variety of circumstances. These include:

  • Business growth is swamping your Help Desk Call Center
  • A member of your Help Desk support staff has left your company
  • You are opening a new branch in another region
  • Work-from-Home (WFH) users have increased Help Desk Call Center call tickets and created different sorts of support problems
  • Your Help Desk Call Center staff members are more valuable helping with strategic IT projects
A single one of these circumstances can create major pressure on your company's Help Desk and as a consequence impede productivity. If some of these scenarios happen at the same time, your IT support team could be in a lot of hurt.

The Cost of an Internal Help Desk Call Center Worker
It's tempting but unrealistic to compare the base salaries of internal workers with the granular per-minute costs of an external Help Desk Call Center group. Although costs for an in-house Level 1 IT Help Desk person differ from city to city (e.g., Atlanta vs. San Francisco), most areas in the U.S. are in this range:

  • Typical Salary for Level 1 Tech: $45,000-$65,000
  • Taxes, Benefits, PTO: $18,000-$26,000
  • Equipment Costs: $2,000
  • Software: $1,000-$4,000
  • Office Space, Supplies, Furnishings, Utilities: $4,000-$10,000
  • Continuing Education: $1,000
  • Total: $71,000 - $108,000
As in the case of any salaried, permanent employee, the true yearly cost of a Help Desk Call Center Level 1 support person can be in excess of 50% above the base salary. These costs do not factor in one-time costs for referral fees, vetting, setup, or job training. They also do not account for the cost of setting up new employees who quickly quit.

In order to make a realistic evaluation between the cost/benefits of an in-house Help Desk vs. Progent's external Help Desk Call Center services, the costs of Progent's services should be looked at against the benefits. Issues to consider include:

  • Progent bills Help Desk Call Center customers for service by the minute and at a discounted rate: Typical cost to Progent clients for outsourced Level 1 Help Desk Call Center support services start at around $18 for each user monthly. Fine-grained billing means utilization is virtually 100%. You only pay for services delivered. Salaried in-house workers occasionally encounter dead time that you pay for.
  • Progent can provide 24x7 service: Progent's regular service availability is 14 hours per day on weekdays. Round-the-clock service is optional. Internally staffed Help Desks are typically operational only during normal working hours. This can impede productivity if serious issues occur during off hours. Also, exfiltration attacks such as ransomware are commonly activated over weekends when network support teams are thinly staffed.
  • Progent's Help Desk scales easily: Recruiting new internal IT employees could take months. By leveraging Progent's nationwide roster of technical support professionals you can adjust your Help Desk capacity as needed. You don't have to worry about finding replacements for people out sick, hiring new IT support staff to handle growing demand or to take the place of workers who leave, or trimming your full-time internal IT team when business slows. You can easily adjust to business cycles inherent to your industry or responsive to the economy in general.
  • Contractual responsiveness: Progent provides Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to make sure service calls are dealt with in a timely manner. Internal Help Desk groups have no real equivalent of an SLA.
  • Breadth of technical skills: Progent has been delivering online technical support for over 20 years. Progent's technical support experts are familiar with a wide range of modern and legacy technologies running in a wide variety of industries. This range of expertise enables Progent to save time and expense by delivering fast fixes to issues that could otherwise be promoted to a higher and more pricey support level. In our quickly evolving IT world, it is tough on the budget when unfamiliar products and technologies have to be mastered at your expense. In addition, Progent's expertise makes it possible to foresee and fix emerging technical problems before they are able to impact productivity.
  • Fast access to subject matter experts (SMEs): Progent's Help Desk outsourcing and co-sourcing services also provide access to Progent's pool of subject matter experts to deliver fast solutions to Level 2 and Level 3 technical issues that are beyond the skill set of most Level 1 Help Desk Call Center techs. Progent's ability to assign the right engineer for a high-level problem can minimize costly downtime.
  • Enterprise-class multi-tenant ticketing and monitoring system: Progent safely shares enterprise-class service automation software that permits Progent and clients to create and monitor IT trouble tickets, establish responsibility, follow the real-time status of issues, record services performed, and produce management reports.
  • Help Desk co-sourcing shares the work: Progent's Co-sourced Help Desk Call Center service transparently shares service calls between your internal IT support staff and Progent's pool of service techs and subject matter experts. You determine the way trouble tickets are allocated, but Progent typically deals with Level 1 and Level 3 issues. The Help Desk Call Center software transparently ticket creation, escalation or de-escalation, tracking, and management reporting. The co-sourcing model permits your in-house techs to deliver in-person support when situations require it and at the same time enables on-demand scale-up for remote help.
  • Let your internal IT service team concentrate on operational aspects of your business: Your in-house IT service team knows more about your business than any external support organization. Utilizing Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing or co-sourcing services frees these precious human assets from being consumed by low-level troubleshooting such as configuring work-at-home routers and offers them the opportunity to marshal technology to deliver competitive advantage.
In the end, the greatest advantage of Progent's Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing and Co-Sourcing service is the minimization of computer downtime. Whether for one worker or a whole organization, waiting for an IT solution is an expensive activity.

Find Out More about Progent's Help Desk Outsourcing Services
To find out more about Progent's Help Desk Outsourcing and Co-sourcing services, see Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing and co-sourcing services. To ask about how to get started with Progent's Help Desk Call Center services, phone 800-993-9400 or go to Contact Progent.



An index of content::






    •
    © 2002-2026 Progent Corporation. All rights reserved.