Repercussions of an Underutilized Service Desk for a Business
As far as quality IT support is concerned, businesses that choose a vendor for service desk outsourcing frequently find that they receive what they are paying for. However, the statement is hardly true for any underutilized service desk irrespective of how good the provider could be in delivering customer service and technical proficiency. Nevertheless, there are many organizations that are known to utilize a service desk less than what they initially conceived.
Although the support requirement could have been well-qualified when the solution was proposed by the vendor, underutilization could be an outcome of less than an optimum internal promotion of a new service desk, end users and internal IT staff not adopting the outsourced model, and stabilization of an earlier volatile IT environment.
Specific Businesses
To be more specific, businesses, which are downsizing their staff can make a case to retain all in-house IT functions including all such activities that are usually handled by an outsourced solution for the service desk.
If the service desk has the relevant documentation, training, and proper access, it can handle any remote task including offboarding and onboarding processes, driver and printer mapping, Active Directory administration, and application installations.
Thus, any business that handles such tasks in-house rather than delegating them to their outsourced service desk provider is actually spending more from their IT budget than needed. In case that is the case, these organizations need to retrospect and ask themselves what amount they are paying to their in-house IT staff for doing the same activity a remote agent at Level 1 can resolve.
An underutilized service desk can be also expensive for an organization’s dedicated staffing model. It is one of those key reasons why many clients feel that outsourcing is more alluring as compared to them adding more in-house staff in their payrolls. Thus, rather than recruiting a full-time manpower to maintain coverage for 24X7 and cope up with minimal after-hours call volume, they can just pay for a few tickets to be handled by a shared team of the service desk.
Major Pain Points for an Underutilized Service Desk
To sum up, your underutilized service desk can compound the IT operational costs and here are some of the major pain areas:
- Charging fixed outsourcing costs irrespective of low Return On Investment or usage
- Cost gets shifted to as well as replicated by internal resources to resolve problems at a higher compensation
- Downtime for end users go up while awaiting or researching solution
There are means of avoiding undue expenses linked to an organization’s underutilized service desk. Prior to contemplating a solution, it is better to interact with your potential service provider about the separation of duties such as defining and segregating the asks that are to be outsourced to an outsourced service desk and the ones that will be carried out by the in-house IT employees of your business.
After all, your key goal should be to ensure that the IT expenses are at a minimum, define as well as assign duties, which will be at sync with every designated IT group based on their skill level and area of expertise.
