Why Outsourced Help Desk Support Is Worth It

Outsourcing your help desk support can feel like “just another expense.” But often, the opposite is true; outsourcing your help desk support can save your organization money, both short-term and long-term.

You don’t need to hear that an MSP is going to save you money. Every help desk support service promises that it is more cost-effective than an in-house team. What you need to know is whether help desk support will be worth it. Will it be worth disrupting your existing operations? Will it be worth potentially losing some of your internal IT staff?

Let’s examine some critical advantages of outsourcing your help desk support and moving some of your essential operations outside your organization.

Why Outsource? We All Know the Major Advantages…

By now, most companies know the major advantages of outsourcing help desk support. It frees your staff to focus on other tasks. You can save money by taking advantage of economies of scale. You can improve the efficiency within your business. For most companies, it’s the smart choice.

But there are hidden advantages, too. By outsourcing your help desk support, you get faster, more responsive technicians. That reduces your potential for security risk and reduces the chances that you could get hit by an expensive data breach or data loss event.

Outsourcing your help desk support also improves resiliency. You’re probably experiencing some major employee churn right now, especially in lower-level IT and help desk ticketing. With an outsourced team, you can avoid employee churn and training while still maintaining consistency.

And you don’t need to deal with the talent shortage. Most companies are already struggling to hire qualified IT teams.

Still, if you haven’t outsourced help desk support yet, there’s probably something holding you back. It could be that you just don’t have the cash outlay to invest in the upfront costs, or it could be that you’re worried about downsizing your in-house team. The reality is that between employee churn and the current talent shortage, your in-house IT team could soon downsize itself.

What’s Stopping You from Outsourcing?

What’s stopping you from outsourcing your operations? Are you concerned that it would be too expensive? That it would be disruptive to your operations? Or, as mentioned, are you concerned that you would need to downsize your own internal IT department?

Outsourcing doesn’t have to be disruptive; a good help desk provider will work with you to ensure a smooth transition. But understandably, many organizations hesitate to increase their costs when they’re trying to reduce their costs.

While there may be an upfront cost to the transition, moving to an outsourced solution saves the company money long-term. There’s never any “perfect time” to transition to another help desk solution, but your help desk company can give you insights into how they can help you save money across the board.

Even better, they may be able to help you with more than just your help desk.

What About an MSP?

You can outsource your help desk ticketing solution to an MSP, sure—but you can also outsource other things, such as major IT projects and transitions.

When you start working with an MSP, the MSP will give you key insights into what it can achieve for you, far beyond just help desk ticketing. The MSP can give you recommendations on how to improve your overall security posture, how to make the most of your technology budget and how to streamline your operations.

You may be spending too much on your technology already and not be aware of it. If you’ve moved to the cloud within the past few years, odds are that you’re overspending significantly on your cloud services.

Saving money all starts with finding the right technology partner.

Today’s Technical Burden Continues to Grow

It used to be that a company, even a large company, could have one or two sysadmins. A single systems administrator was able to monitor and manage the entirety of the office. But now, we don’t just have a talent shortage, we have a technical burden. A single organization may require the management of thousands upon thousands of devices, from IoT devices to mobile devices.

Apart from that, the technology is growing in complexity to the extent that many experts may not even understand all the technologies that a single organization uses. A company can either hire a team of dozens of specialists and experts internally, or they can work with an MSP, who already has those specialists available.

The technical burden is only going to continue to grow. Tomorrow’s enterprise is going to run on hyperautomation, machine learning and quantum computing. These are simply things that it isn’t reasonable to manage in-house.

You may already have a dozen SaaS solutions that you need to integrate across your entire team. Are you able to provide support for each of these SaaS solutions effectively? Or is your team spending a lot of time trying to interface with the tech support teams of each solution?

Using an MSP or help desk ticketing provider isn’t just going to provide you with better, faster care. The care will also be more robust and scalable. You consolidate your points of contact to a single platform rather than trying to deal with each SaaS solution individually. And you can reduce your reliance on your in-house IT team, which should be free to innovate and generate revenue.

Why Outsourced Help Desk Support is Worth It

So, here’s the bottom line. Outsourcing your help desk support will save you money by providing greater levels of service and efficiency than an internal IT team can. When you outsource your help desk support, you gain access to an extraordinary wealth of IT talent and technology. A wealth of IT talent and technology that would be simply prohibitive to hire internally.

Even more than that, though, you can outsource even more of your operations with the help of an MSP. By working with an MSP as a technology partner, you can audit your existing infrastructure, find ways to save on costs and optimize your tech stack. An MSP will have the bandwidth to constantly seek out improvements, optimizations and cost-cutting measures for you, in a way that your internal team will not.

Technology is becoming exponentially more complex, even as it becomes more accessible. When a person needs a doctor, they don’t try to send themselves to medical school; they hire a professional. In the same way, outsourcing help desk support just makes sense. Contact Red River today to find out more.