Do you appreciate your service desk provider?

If you’re thinking about taking your outsourced service desk back inhouse, think carefully about the consequences. For whatever reason you outsourced your IT helpdesk, or service desk, originally, that reason may still stand, and even though there have likely been huge changes since then in your business, there are some important questions you need to ask about your outsourced provision before you consider taking it back.

Maybe you outsourced your IT service desk some time ago because it made sense operationally for your customers to be looked after by a dedicated, specialist resource. Or maybe your resources for expansion were better deployed elsewhere rather than funding, staffing and managing your own service desk. Or, maybe your whole service desk just became too technical to develop and deliver sufficient service to your customers and you needed experts to take care of the whole thing.

Undoubtedly, the pandemic has affected businesses in ways never previously experienced. Organisations need to save money and, at least in the short term, begin to make compromises, cuts and alterations to their service. But, as tempting as it may be to consider bringing back in previously outsourced helpdesk provision, consider what it is providing to your customers. There’s a simple way to find out.

Ask your service desk provider what’s been going on

How many service requests or tickets has your provider responded to in the last three months? What were the nature of those service requests? Do they indicate any trends to do with the development of service your customers are demanding? Your service provider will gladly speak to you about what their experience has been and their answers will give you the facts on which to base your decision.

If your outsourced provider has taken over 1500 calls in a matter of weeks, ask yourself whether you are going to be able to cope with this. And even if you can, what is the experience going to be of those customers? If you’re compromising service to your customer base, think about the effect long-term on your business.

Can you fulfil the terms of your contracts?

Ultimately, if you can’t fulfil the terms of your service level agreements and contracts with your customers, the contracts will be lost. Ultimately, this may be a fate that’s worse than other alternatives for getting over a difficult time.

There may be another solution that many outsourced service desk providers will be happy to discuss with you, such as reduced terms, temporary support in other areas and compromises in the types of provision. It may certainly be worth a conversion before drastically pulling your service desk away from the expert provider who has been keeping your customer base quietly happy. Long-term, the financial outlay may be worth it just to keep the noise away so that you can keep on trading and growing. 

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