Should you outsource your help desk?

May 24, 1999
Andy Weeks

One of the most frequent questions I encounter is whether companies should consider outsourcing their help desk. While there are advantages to outsourcing, consider these issues before you make your decision.

Performance
If your help desk is underperforming, whether measured based upon set metrics or customer satisfaction numbers, outsourcing can kick-start your help desk operation. Often companies with internal help desks are staffed by employees who feel stuck in what they consider a dead-end job. Unfortunately, they may also be stuck from the company's perspective as employees may not have promotion opportunities. As a result, low morale affects their ability to perform.

Bringing in an outsourcing company can allow a fresh start, with new faces who are motivated to provide performance. Help desk personnel performance usually peaks at six to 12 months of service, after they have become familiar with the environment and before they reach the burnout phase.

In addition, outsourcers who provide these services to a number of companies often invest in technology that can substantially improve help desk performance. Technologies like automatic call distribution (ACD), call accounting, and automated voice response (AVR) can dramatically increase performance without a commensurate increase in staffing. (Of course, this can also apply to insourced help desks as well.)

Staffing
Let's face it—working the help desk is not the most desirable job in any IT organization. Phone duty typically goes to the least experienced staffers. Customers only call when they have a problem, so you are already one strike down when the phone rings. The phones may be quiet for an hour or two, and then suddenly calls flood in at the rate of several each minute. Stress leading to burnout is a real factor. Most companies have trouble keeping people on the help desk for more than a year at a time.

Outsourcing allows companies to send these headaches to someone else. The help desk provider has the ability to roll analysts through the help desk into other positions before burnout sets in. In addition, by spreading the call center across several clients, outsourcing companies can even out the peaks and valleys in call volumes you see in a single organization, also reducing stress.

Culture
This is perhaps the most overlooked factor in considering an outsourcing decision. Even if all the other factors point toward outsourcing, if your corporate culture is not conducive, outsourcing will have a very difficult time succeeding.

Does your organization run "lean and mean," with a utility approach to services? In this environment, pieces of your organization can be replaced without substantially affecting user perception. Outsourcing, as a result, will have an easier road to success.

On the other hand, organizations that value relationships and business savvy over utility will find it difficult to outsource successfully. For example, companies using an outsourcer who shares a Level 1 call center with many clients will find that the analysts taking the call will have little specific knowledge of the caller's environment. This may be fine if the culture values quick and accurate response over making the caller comfortable.

Cost
The 2,000-pound gorilla driving this decision for most companies is cost, of course. Outsourcing companies typically share high-dollar help desk costs, like call center technology and staffing across multiple clients. In addition, outsourcers can typically balance their analysts' workload more effectively, getting more calls per day out of each resource, again reducing costs. As volumes change, outsourcers can change resource allocation incrementally. It makes sense for an outsourcer to offer half of an analyst (who will be shared between several companies anyway), where a company must hire in full-employee increments. On the other hand, the outsourcer must take their margin, eating some or all of the savings.

In the next column, we will look at insourcing your help desk and staffing strategies.

Andy Weeks is the director of consulting for Koinonia Computing. He has worked in IT for over a decade as an end-user support manager, network architect, and business process consultant. If you have questions specific to help desk operations, please contact Andy here.