6 reasons why you should outsource your service desk

The practice of outsourcing work processes to external service providers has become increasingly common in recent years. Business process outsourcing (BPO) offers multiple advantages, enabling companies of all sizes to add new capabilities, accommodate global customer needs, and scale rapidly and cost effectively—all without adding headcount.

In this article, we’ll explore six advantages of outsourcing service desk support functions such as IT help desks, customer support, and content management. We’ll also explore some considerations when choosing a service desk partner.

Outsourcing your service desk has six key advantages

1. Expanded support hours

While your business may operate within a traditional five-day, 9-to-5 work week, your customers might not. This is especially true if your customers are outside your time zone. By outsourcing, you can expand your service desk to accommodate customer time zone needs. You can even provide 24×7 support from a live representative and avoid the frustration of sending support calls to voice mail

2. Global support options

If your customers are global, they’ll expect timely support regardless of their location—regardless of where you are. They’ll also want to speak to a representative in their native language. By outsourcing your service desk, you can provide localized assistance your customers will appreciate. Additionally, offshore support can drive cost efficiencies and give you an in-country presence without the costs and headaches opening an in-country office.

3. Streamlined management

Managing a service desk can put a substantial strain on management resources. Outsourcing to a third party enables your management teams to focus on running your business and accelerating profits without adding headcount. A service desk partner will do all the recruiting, hiring, training, and personnel management for you. Plus, you don’t have to worry about securing additional space to accommodate new employees.

4. Increased quality

Your employees excel at what they do. But running a service desk may fall outside their area of proficiency. By outsourcing your service desk to an expert provider, you benefit from their expertise and avoid the stress of hiring and training staff. Plus, a well-trained and experienced service desk helps ensure customer issues are resolved quickly—keeping customers happy while ensuring your employees can focus on business priorities.

5. Rapid implementation

Setting up a service desk can be a major undertaking, taking up time and resources. Outsourcing to an expert provider minimizes set up time and leverages years of expertise, best practice tools and processes, trained personnel, and efficiencies to implement a fully functioning service desk in minimal time.

6. Increased scalability

As your business grows and changes, your teams also need to grow and change.  Outsourcing your service desk enables your business to accommodate shifting business demands without straining on existing resources.

What to look for when choosing a service desk partner

Customizable offerings

Your business is unique and has its own unique needs. Choose a service desk partner that has a wide range of flexible offerings that can be customized for your business. Work with them to create a custom service level agreement (SLA) that promotes continuous process improvement and can scale cost effectively as your business needs evolve.

Proven tools and processes

The best providers use proven tools and models such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Help Desk Institute (HDI) that are customizable and repeatable to streamline support. Make sure that there are processes in place to measure KPIs, resolve issues quickly, and drive efficiencies.

Quality

You want your service desk to reflect the high standards you set for your own business. As part of your evaluation, examine their hiring practices to ensure they are recruiting and retaining customer-focused personnel with relevant skillsets and certifications. Ask about their employee retention metrics and seek out references and feedback from other businesses.

Privacy and security

Your service desk partner may be handling sensitive data. Make sure your partner has tools and processes in place to protect customer privacy and sensitive data.

Communications and reporting

Be sure that communications with your partner are timely. Ask potential partners about their communications and status update policies and practices, which should also be included in your SLA. Look for a responsive partner that keeps you informed, responds quickly and professionally, and has a clear escalation policy.

Whether you’re expanding globally or refocusing staff on core capabilities, outsourcing your service desk can be an excellent and cost-effective solution. Beyondsoft can help you keep your business running smoothly. Our service desk offerings include quality reviews, contract management, technical support desk, ITIL operations management, business continuity management, and more. To learn more about how we can help, contact us to speak to an expert and view our portfolio of service desk and BPO offerings.

 

Four reasons that powering service desk operations with AI And ML makes good business sense

Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are reshaping the way we live and work, providing incredible opportunities to augment human capabilities to drive efficiencies, increase quality, deliver cost savings, and enhance customer value.

And while there are countless ways to apply these technologies, today I want to focus on service desk operations. Beyondsoft Intelligent Operations Platform (BIOPs) uses AI and ML to not only automate time-consuming manual processes; it can drastically increase the quality of your operations while keeping costs low. Below are four ways these technologies are transforming service desk operations.

1. Workflow automation

With AI/ML, you can automate manual, repetitive processes, such as service ticket creation and workflows. Virtual assistants that interact with end-users 24×7 can perform early triage and troubleshooting to minimize unnecessary support calls. They can also collect necessary details to create and route tickets to support agents, eliminating tedious data entry, and saving both agents and the end user’s time. Additionally, workflows, including handoffs, can be automated, reducing the instance of human error and ensuring tickets stay on track for timely closure within SLAs.

2. Intelligent KPI monitoring

Monitoring progress against KPIs is critical to ensuring your organization meets business goals. Intelligent KPI analysis identifies trends and patterns and offers real-time insights into your systems, including processes that are working well and those that could use improvement.

Intelligent KPI monitoring also improves issue detection. Typically, with manual issue detection, a set of rules based on the experiences of experts gets generated. An alert is triggered only if the KPI data violate one or a combination of these rules. However, these pre-set rules also pose many limitations: the experience is not reliable, the condition may change over time, and special events (like holidays) may shift the pattern of the KPI data. As a result, the alert system may have a high noise level.

With intelligent KPI monitoring, the system leverages AI and ML to learn from historical data, creating dynamic rules based on current data context and detecting problems in real-time with much higher accuracy—and fewer false alarms. This enables your organization to respond faster and with more accuracy, improving service quality while keeping labor costs to a minimum.

3. Root cause analysis

Modern systems are complex, often comprised of multiple subsystems, which may have their own data storage, monitoring systems, and operations teams. When a subsystem detects a problem, it can be challenging to determine if an upstream service or system causes it. Furthermore, a single issue can set off multiple alerts. And when you factor in data availability and variations in human expertise, it can be extremely challenging and time-consuming to find the root cause.

By leveraging AI and ML, data are integrated at the backend for analysis. A pretrained model determines root causes based on learnings from historical incidents, delivering the most likely result to the operations specialist. This fully automated approach significantly reduces the time and cost of root cause analysis, which means operations teams spend less time triaging and more time taking the actions needed to resolve issues and keep systems performing at optimal levels.

For a great example of how AI and ML can help transform root cause analysis, we can look to one of our customers. This cloud service provider offers more than 70 services across 40 global data centers. Before BIOPs, they were getting more than 9,000 alerts daily—too many to handle. Furthermore, event handling was reactive at best, and customer satisfaction was low. Meanwhile, around 80% of service desk work was repetitious, wasting valuable time and resources.

By introducing BIOPs into their service desk operations, they were able to quickly identify more than 20 hidden relationships between their services, helping them to expedite root cause analysis and decrease the number of alerts—and the time spent researching them. And by automating tedious processes, our customer was able to save time and money. Finally, thanks to 100% accurate event prediction, the customer can proactively avoid issues while responding more quickly to problems that do arise, increasing customer satisfaction.

4. Resource forecasting

Manual workforce management and forecasting can be difficult. Statistics just aren’t enough to accurately foresee future needs. And to meet SLA requirements and avoid labor shortfalls, resources are often overbudgeted. However, in addition to data, intelligent KPI forecasting analyzes historical trends and patterns to provide much more accurate forecasts, reducing the need for overstaffing and associated labor costs.

Furthermore, AI and ML can also predict computing volumes to anticipate bottlenecks and take proactive actions, such as increasing machine and network bandwidth, to accommodate usage spikes. This ensures higher service quality and limits the number of issues that require support.

During a recent project, we deployed BIOPs to help a significant software company leverage AI and ML for resource forecasting. As a result, they are now able to forecast staffing levels and change two weeks in advance, drastically increasing the accuracy of their capacity planning and also helping them to save labor costs.

Trust the experts at Beyondsoft

Ultimately, applying AI and ML to service desk operations can increase your efficiency and productivity as well as service desk quality—all for a lower cost. It requires less employee training to run and less reliance on human problem-solving efforts. It also ensures a growing knowledge base that stays with your organization even after vital resources move on to new roles.

Beyondsoft has decades of experience deploying and managing service desks, along with expertise in applying AI and ML with Beyondsoft Intelligent Operations Platform. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help, contact us today.