Help Desk Subcontracted By MSP: How to Avoid These Difficulties

Transitioning clients to the outsourcing help desk

You decided to outsource the Level 1 help desk (as before). This alone is a difficult decision, but it turns out that customer migration is equally difficult. He works hard to develop the standards and cultures that his clients are used to. Adapting external equipment to these processes is not easy and must be done at a cost.

To help with this process, here are some issues to consider when switching to outsourced help desks:

Entry Capture Process

One of the most notable differences that has been identified with the use of external support services is the time from when the phone is answered until the first troubleshooting step begins. Our internal team was used to receiving calls from the same customer, so when they answered the call, they often recognized the other party's number and voice and had trouble communicating. I was able to jump straight into the shoot.

By contrast, outsourced service desk are generally forced to follow ingestion scripts and are not very familiar to customers. It turns out that the process of obtaining your information, searching your account and creating a ticket can take several minutes.

Customer reports

As a company, we wanted to build a culture of analytical responsibility. The technicians knew that they would log into the system every second they spent on tickets or projects. Our team adhered to this policy because we knew that our intention was not to track and control the lack of productivity, but to measure the profitability of contracts with clients.

We report this information and share it with the customer to determine if the usage was excessive. This became very difficult after moving to outsourced Level 1 teams. No matter how many attempts we have made, the outsourcing team did not have the same standard for follow up time. This information suddenly became inaccurate and was of little use in negotiations with clients.

If your company depends on the hours of resources recorded to report, highlight it to your external partners from the first day of the transition period.

Request for Time & Documents

The standard (or lack thereof) of recorded resource hours can also have a significant effect on T&M customer billing. Customers have never expressed any concerns about it, but it was clearly an issue for our revenue.

Average billed time has decreased so much that all T&M customers had to part ways with the outsourcing team and work together internally until they found a way to solve the problem.

If you are fully committed to the outsourced help desk model, we recommend that you renegotiate the T&M agreement in advance. You may need to increase the rate or change the way the time is rounded to make up for the lost time recorded.

A little conversation with a customer.

Outsourced technicians often received feedback from clients who were "very professional" and "caring", but not necessarily "friendly". After listening to the phone for hours, I agreed. When the outsourced technician handled the ticket, the "little story" was generally absent and very quiet.

This is a very difficult problem to handle, but it can actually change the way customers finally perceive the service. We have always encouraged our internal teams to be as human as possible, even if they are a little less sophisticated.

This may be something you want to prepare for your clients so that they are not surprised when they happen. It's also worth contacting the account manager more frequently and making efforts to help reinforce the human side of the brand.

We hope this information helps you to overcome some of the problems we face and that the transition to an external help desk is a smooth transition. If you have any questions about how you've overcome a particular problem, or if you have other problems yourself, feel free to post in the comments below.