PC Desktop Consulting and Support Services

The Economics of Help Desk Outsourcing or Co-sourcing
Progent's Help Desk outsourcing services offer substantial business benefits compared with going it alone with a Help Desk run exclusively by internal IT personnel. Some of the benefits of outsourcing, like increased computer or network uptime, obviously contribute to productivity but are difficult to evaluate in dollars. Other issues, like in-house salaries vs. granular charges for external Help Desk services, can be deceptive at first glance. This discussion will clarify the key cost issues associated with selecting an internal or an outsourced or co-sourced Help Desk Call Center.

If you operate an in-house Help Desk Call Center, you may need to make a decision whether you should add people to your service group or outsource Help Desk Call Center services. You could arrive at this juncture owing to a number of circumstances. These include:

• Workforce growth is overwhelming your Help Desk Call Center
• One of your Help Desk Call Center team has taken another job
• You are opening an additional office in a different city
• Work-from-Home employees have multiplied Help Desk Call Center call tickets and created different types of support problems
• Your Help Desk team members are needed to help with operational IT projects

The Cost of an In-House Help Desk Call Center Employee
It's tempting but unrealistic to compare the raw salaries of internal personnel with the granular per-minute costs of an outsourced Help Desk Call Center group. Although costs for an in-house IT Help Desk worker differ from state to state and city to city (e.g., Atlanta vs. San Francisco), most regions in the United States fall into this range:

• Typical Base Salary for Level 1 Technician: $45,000-$65,000
• Taxes, Benefits, PTO: $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 realistic evaluation between the cost efficiency of an internal Help Desk vs. Progent's outside Help Desk Call Center services, the costs of Progent's services should be looked at against the benefits. Items to take into account include:

• Progent bills Help Desk Call Center clients for service by the minute and at a discount: Average price to Progent clients for Progent's Level 1 Help Desk support start at about $18 for each user per month. Fine-grained pricing means utilization is essentially 100%. You only pay for services delivered. Full-time in-house workers occasionally encounter dead time and the meter is always running.
• Progent can provide extended hours service: Progent's standard service availability is 14 hours per day on weekdays. 24x7 service programs are optional. Internally staffed Help Desk Call Centers are usually operational only for normal working hours. This could impact productivity if major issues occur during off hours. Also, exfiltration attacks such as ransomware are typically launched during weekends when network support groups are thinly staffed.
• Progent's Help Desk scales on demand: Hiring new internal IT personnel could take months. By tapping into Progent's nationwide team of technical support professionals you can right size your Help Desk Call Center capacity on demand. You don't have to fret about filling in for technicians out sick, attracting new IT support help to handle increased demand or to replace workers who leave, or trimming your permanent internal IT team when business slows. You can quickly adjust to business cycles peculiar to your market or reflective of the economy in general.
• Guaranteed responsiveness: Progent provides Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure that service calls are handled in a timely manner. In-house Help Desk teams can offer no practical equivalent of an SLA.
• Breadth of IT skills: Progent has been delivering remote IT support for more than 20 years. Progent's technical support experts are steeped in a wide range of modern and legacy technologies deployed in a variety of industries. This range of skills allows Progent to save time and expense by delivering fast fixes to problems that could otherwise be shuttled to a higher and more pricey level of support. In our quickly evolving IT world, it is tough on the wallet when newer technologies need to be mastered at your expense. In addition, Progent's expertise makes it easier to foresee and fix budding technical problems before they can impact productivity.
• Access to subject matter experts (SMEs): Progent's Help Desk outsourcing services also provide access to Progent's pool of SMEs to offer quick resolution of Level 2 and Level 3 technical problems that are outside the scope of Level 1 Help Desk Call Center technicians. Progent's ability to assign the appropriate SME for a high-level problem can reduce the disruption caused by downtime.
• Enterprise-grade multi-tenant ticketing and tracking technology: Progent safely shares enterprise-class service management software that permits Progent and customers to generate and monitor IT trouble tickets, establish responsibility, show the progress of problems, document activity, and generate management analytics.
• Help Desk co-sourcing distributes the work: Progent's Co-sourced Help Desk service seamlessly shares service requests between a client's internal IT support team and Progent's pool of service technicians and SMEs. You select how trouble tickets are allocated, but Progent typically handles Level 1 and Level 3 issues. The Help Desk software transparently takes care of creation, escalation, monitoring, and management reporting. Co-sourcing permits your internal staff to provide hands-on assistance when circumstances call for it and also facilitates fast scale-up for online support.
• Let your internal network support group concentrate on strategic aspects of your business: Your internal IT support group understands more about your business than any external support organization. Utilizing Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing or co-sourcing services frees these valuable human assets from being swamped by Level 1 troubleshooting such as configuring work-at-home routers and offers them the chance to work on marshalling technology to deliver competitive advantage.

Find Out More about Progent's Help Desk Outsourcing and Co-sourcing Services
To find out more about Progent's Help Desk Outsourcing services, see Progent's Help Desk outsourcing services. To find out signing up for Progent's Help Desk Call Center services, phone 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.