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Managed Help Desk Services
Managed Help Desk Services Defined
The managed help desk is an outsourced IT help desk, where service and technical support is provided by a managed service provider (MSP) at a set cost. An organization may choose an outsourced IT help desk option that provides full support to their end-users, or their managed help desk may be used to supplement internal services.
The outsourced IT help desk is different from the service desk in that it offers the traditional support provided by an IT helpdesk: just-in-time training, workarounds for common issues, answers to how-to questions, etc., while the service desk is a more strategic organization that manages requests for goods and services in addition to providing technical support. In fact, using the outsourced help desk as a subset of the service desk enables the service desk to focus on providing their core services more effectively while the managed help desk provides the day-to-day transactional support.
How Do Outsourced Managed IT Services Help My Business?
The outsourced IT help desk provides transactional services at a set fee, enabling internal IT staff to focus on more strategic services and IT management to manage overall support costs. The outsourced help desk manages routine technical support, while internal resources focus on building knowledge and automation, along with other strategic tasks.
In the context of modern service management, the outsourced help desk enables the IT organization to gain better control over operations by enabling technical support to be managed by an experienced provider. The internal service desk and IT support can then focus on managing improvements to service delivery. Thus, the outsourced help desk provides traditional help desk support while the internal service desk focuses on proactive activities like incident management, problem management, and developing knowledge for end-users and outsourced IT help desk use.
Using outsourced IT help desk services enables greater flexibility while maintaining budget stability and enables the IT organization to roll out new technologies more quickly by providing appropriately skilled support personnel. These initiative-driven needs are often covered by the project budget, enabling the ability to add resources without impacting the operational budget. This enables the IT organization to scale project support without decreasing operational capabilities and affecting other business services they support.
In this relationship, the outsourced help desk provider takes on the risk and burden of providing support, while the project team focuses on their rollout and the service desk and IT support continue their focus on core functions, ensuring large-scale changes don’t negatively impact the delivery of operational business services.
Thus, an outsourced managed IT help desk helps the business by providing IT with the ability to stabilize their budget while increasing their capabilities for rolling out innovative business solutions.
At a more tactical level, the managed IT help desk enables organizations of any size to support their business more effectively:
- In a digital world, even small businesses need help desk support services. The outsourced IT help desk enables them to offer 24 x 7 help desk support and compete with larger organizations without hiring and managing the staff needed to deliver support internally.
- In larger organizations, the outsourced IT help desk offloads the tactical work that drains IT operational resources, enabling them to focus on their core business.
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Advantages of a Managed IT Help Desk
While these are one set of general business advantages of the Managed IT help desk, it’s worth looking at all of the benefits of outsourcing help desk services:
- Budget Stability: One of the benefits of outsourcing help desk services is that it removes the budgetary risk of meeting expected service levels from IT. IT simply contracts the services levels it requires for a set fee, removing the risk associated with maintaining service levels internally.
- Cost Savings: While the expected costs are known with an outsourced help desk, they are also often lower than providing this service internally, particularly for a global organization or organizations that need 24 hour help desk support. This is because managed service desk providers can leverage their scale to provide support at a lower cost. Consider overnight support in an organization that may receive a low volume of calls and needs to maintain at least one staff person, vs. an outsourced help desk that might handle numerous organization's overnight needs with only a few technicians. Thus, a benefit of outsourcing help desk services is being able to take advantage of a provider's scale to lower costs.
- Stable, Reliable Support: Running an internal help desk means the organization needs to ensure enough technicians are available 24 hours a day, managing staff absence, resignation, training of new personnel with a level of assurance that doesn't affect the end-users. When the single night-time staff person is ill, finding a replacement can be difficult. The benefit of outsourcing help desk services is that this risk or service interruption is transferred to a provider that has a higher number of staff, that can absorb emergencies without any loss of service reliability or added cost.
- Higher Satisfaction, Fewer Repetitive Calls: With a more experienced team available, another benefit of outsourcing help desk services is that customer satisfaction increases because technicians can answer the question properly the first time, reducing callbacks for status on issues that cannot be resolved during the first call. This is a result of their higher experience levels, better training, and a strong reliance on knowledge, all difficult to achieve internally.
- Ability to Focus on Major Issues: When a major issue occurs, the outsourced help desk can provide immediate service and support to business personnel, enabling senior technicians to focus on the problem at hand, resulting in faster resolution times. In some cases, the outsourced help desk has access and capabilities needed to restore service without escalation to internal resources, depending on the services purchased.
- Faster Resolution Means Lower Wait Times: The experience of the outsourced help desk technicians also means they can fix known issues more quickly due to the volume and repetition they experience. In addition to driving higher satisfaction levels and reducing call volumes, this also reduces wait times and resolution time, enabling people to get back to work faster, a significant benefit of outsourcing help desk services.
- Project and Change Agility: As mentioned previously, a benefit of outsourcing help desk services is additional services can be purchased at any time as part of a project's rollout plan, ensuring a high volume of changes doesn't affect wait times. The flexibility offered also enables the organization to add skills quickly: technicians experienced with a product that is new to an organization. This flexibility enables organizations to keep up with a fast pace of change.
- Higher Employee Satisfaction: Outsourcing the routine work of IT enables internal personnel to work on more interesting and innovative tasks, increasing their overall job satisfaction and increasing retention. An additional benefit of outsourcing help desk services to experience support personnel is that the faster resolution of issues increases the general satisfaction of employees using the service. The ease of getting qualified support for common questions and problems lowers their stress and increases retention outside of IT.
Services Offered by a Managed Help Desk
The terms managed help desk or outsourced IT help desk can cover a variety of services under their service umbrella:
- Help desk technical support manages end-user support needs via telephone and other channels contracted by the business. This can include service portal ticket initiation, email, chat, and phone offered 24 × 7 or to suit a business calendar.
- Help desk monitoring and/or operational support services provide services traditionally offered by a network operations centre (NOC) or operations desk. These services provide 24 × 7 monitoring of technical systems and applications for operational issues and cyber-attacks. These services may also include monitoring automated run-books and restarting failed jobs.
- Help desk onsite support is often available, enabling organizations to save the cost of staffing a widespread footprint. This support is often partnered with the managed help desk, taking second-level tickets that require onsite repairs.
This wide range of services is one of the major benefits of the outsourced help desk, along with the ability to provide consistent and reliable 24-hour help desk support on a 24 × 7 basis. There are several benefits that should be considered by the digital enterprise:
- An outsourced help desk can provide more than technical support for users. Managed help desk services that include operations and monitoring on a 24 × 7 basis alongside 24-hour help desk support enables the organization to lower downtime by ensuring adequate and knowledgeable global support around the clock. Technicians taking calls are also monitoring systems or in contact with the operations part of the team, enabling them to identify and respond to major incidents more quickly and provide timely updates to end-users.
- The support provided by a 24 × 7 outsourced help desk means there is always a single group of technicians monitoring systems, working tickets, and taking calls. Support is not transferred to a different country at the end of a business day or in some cases between internal and external organizations. This retains ownership within a single organization making it easier to ensure accountability for all issues that occur, regardless of the time of day.
- Support can be delivered off-premises, with remote control capabilities, 24 × 7 to any location. This means that end-user support is as good at branches as it is in the corporate offices. Customer-facing business personnel can count on being able to get support quickly regardless of where they are located.