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If you’re like most companies, you probably view the incident-resolving help desk as well as the more holistic service desk as cost centers.  But Generation Y workers, which comprise a growing percentage of today’s workforce, are bringing with them an unprecedented demand for sophisticated IT services – and with that the expectation for an increasingly responsive service desk.  Without a significant increase in IT budgets, these demands will become harder and harder to meet over time.  This is one reason savvy CIOs have begun to consider outsourcing their service desks altogether.

Experts say there are many reasons such a move makes both financial and business sense, citing advantages in service levels, agility, flexibility, staffing and costs that an outsourced service desk solution may be able to offer.  Three reasons, in particular, tend to stand out, experts say, making outsourcing something every CIO should, at the very least, investigate.

Three Reasons to Outsource Your Service Desk

  1. Experience matters: Third-party service desk providers are exposed to all kinds of situations from a variety of clients nationwide on a daily basis.  Over time, this exposure builds the skillsets of their lower level help desk resources so that more calls can be resolved at level 1 in shorter periods of time than can be done with an in-house team.  This yields significant productivity benefits companywide: IT users are back to work in 15 minutes or so, versus the one to four hours and additional expense it can take to escalate a call to higher level experts, and internal IT resources are freed to focus on tasks that are more strategic to the business.
  2. Resources matter: Many companies operate on a round-the-clock basis today, which means their service desks must do the same. Staffing in-house service desks to meet night, weekend and holiday hours can be a difficult as well as expensive task; taking advantage of shared resources via outsourcing can result in significant cost savings and provide a higher level of support during unusual or off hours than in-house teams are able to offer.
  3. Money matters: Because internal service desks are considered cost centers, they typically operate with a lean staff.  However, with pared-down staffing, when employees take sick days, vacation days or even just go to lunch, their absence must be handled by creating rotations or pulling other employees away from their regular positions to fill the gaps.  This can cause significant disruptions and can become a costly problem that results in overstaffing to eliminate these voids, something which outsourced solutions can resolve efficiently and cost effectively.  Want to see if outsourcing is right for you without fully committing? Look for a partner that offers an after-hours-only service using U.S.-based personnel to test the waters on a lighter scale.

To help you determine if an outsourced service desk solution makes both business and financial sense for your organization, Logicalis US is hosting a series of multi-city regional service desk events.  During these events, to be held throughout the month of October, Logicalis experts will discuss the technical and business advantages of moving non-value-added activities – including help desk support – to a third party, freeing time and internal IT resources to focus on business innovation.  To register to attend one of these regional events, visit http://ow.ly/RAg3I.

In the meantime, to learn more, read about your peers’ top six service desk concerns as well as the critical questions to ask a potential service desk partner: http://ow.ly/RjI4V.  Then, see how one business used an outsourced help desk solution to resolve end-user incidents and increase internal IT focus on driving sales and efficiencies: http://ow.ly/RjHGC.