How Outsourcing Your Help Desk Can Power Up Your MSP Business

It’s likely you’re already using help desk software to manage your customers’ queries and requests. However, ensuring your IT support desk operates efficiently is a challenge when you’re focused on growth. When growing your managed service provider (MSP), you can attract more clients and expand service offerings, which can lead to an increased demand for customer support.

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To address this, why not outsource your help desk services? Curious how outsourcing help desk services can help power up your MSP business growth? Continue reading.

Why Outsourcing MSP Help Desk Makes Sense?

Help desk outsourcing allows MSPs to delegate all or part of their IT support services or Network Operation Centers (NOC) to other companies. This results in the discovery of new business opportunities that support the future growth of your business.

When you focus on customer support, it can be a struggle to find time to:

Outsourcing also helps MSPs identify problems like zero-day attacks that often go undiscovered, causing a break in business continuity. Such a risk disrupts operations, as employees spend hours trying to retrieve lost data.

You could also face hefty fines and your reputation tarnished. Outsourced help desk services can detect a cyber threat and resolve it immediately, hence protecting your business.

Ways Outsourcing Help Desk Can Power Up Your MSP

1. Reduces Costs

Cost savings is one of the top reasons businesses outsource functions to third-party vendors. When you partner with third-party help desk companies, you eliminate expenses associated with hiring in-house staff.

You don’t have to worry about monthly salaries, rising employee benefit costs, IT equipment and software, or professional development (training). That’s because outsourcing converts fixed costs into variable expenses, freeing up capital that you could direct into other areas of your business that drive growth.

2. Supports a Proactive Approach to Strategic Growth

Outsourcing non-revenue-generating functions is an effective growth hack. In this case, working with outsourced help desk agents allows your business to shift its focus from a reactive support model to a more proactive and strategic approach.

Too often, MSP business owners get distracted managing full-time in-house help desk teams. They focus more on ticketing, ensuring staff work to full capacity to manage client tech-related inquiries and requests effectively. The outcome: Limited time to pay attention to strategic efforts to grow your business.

With an outsourced team, you have frontline support to answer phones, provide tech solutions, and follow up on customer tickets efficiently. This frees up your time, allowing you to concentrate on IT strategies that match your MSP long-term goals.

Several things happen when your business makes a strategic shift. For starters, your IT infrastructure planning and resource allocation improve. You and your team can also set a stronger foundation to foster innovation and growth.

3. Allows Access to Specialized Skills

Outsourced IT help desk firms specialize in managing customer calls and inquiries and providing tech solutions. They have provided help desk services to different managed service providers (MSPs). That means they have redefined, developed, and delivered various IT support services over the years.

According to STAFFVIRTUAL, a team composed of professionals focused on managed service provider’s help desk provides detailed and customized service packages to enhance your IT support processes. They know the resources to use and how to train staff to ensure they provide the highest level of support that contributes to your company’s growth.

4. Leverage Advanced Technologies

Outsourced MSP help desk companies invest in the latest tools and technologies as part of their strategy to stay competitive in the industry. As an MSP, you benefit by getting access to advanced tools required to streamline customer support without worrying about upfront costs and maintenance.

Typically, external help desk teams implement the latest technologies quickly to help meet or surpass your service level agreement (SLA). For example, using advanced ticketing software and AI-enabled tools like chatbots allows outsourced teams to deliver basic self-help services 24/7. With such technologies, you can enhance the efficiency of your help desk services, providing a better experience to your customers at low costs

5. Increased Customer Services Through 24/7 Support

Providing round-the-clock support is an ideal tactic for improving your customer service. Think of it this way- your customers’ problems don’t sleep, so your support services shouldn’t shut down at 5 PM. If a client has a network failure, they expect you to resolve the issue immediately, even if it occurs in the middle of the night.

Failure to do so results in losing customers to competitors with more flexible hours. Outsourcing help desk functions helps you provide 24/7 support, ensuring technical issues are resolved promptly. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and retention.

6. Enhances Risk Management and Compliance

The last thing you want to encounter when boosting your MSP’s growth is costly risks like service disruptions because of data breaches or vendor lock-ins and regulatory issues. How does outsourcing help mitigate risks and remain compliant?

Outsourced firms provide high-level expertise in handling data security and privacy concerns. They use sophisticated detection tools to identify the greatest cyber threats to businesses and other potential risks before they cause costly downtime.

Your external team could also implement monitoring protocols to ensure your help desk operations adhere to set laws. The added layer of security and compliance enables you to provide top-notch help desk services while meeting legal and ethical standards.

7. Promotes Flexible Scalability

Help desks are not always busy, meaning your MSP experiences seasons with high and low call volumes. During peak season scaling an in-house team can be challenging, including needing to budget for equipment, training, salaries, and pricy office space to support new hires.

Outsourcing your help desk is a viable option, as it offers flexibility whether you want to scale up or down. With variable cost offerings, outsourced teams allow you to scale up your help desk at low costs.

Likewise, you can scale down without the challenge of laying off some members of an in-house team. That's because you have the freedom to choose the size of the team you want to work with based on call volumes and budget.

Conclusion

Outsourcing your help desk services powers up your MSP because you have access to expertise and the latest technologies required to enhance customer services. This translates into improved customer experience and retention.

Plus, outsourced teams dedicate all their work hours to providing exceptional IT support services even after hours. Even more intriguing is that outsourcing is cost-efficient compared to maintaining an in-house team.

Providing high-level IT support at a lower cost allows you to direct capital to operations that drive growth.