5 Challenges SMBs Face When Contracting Help Desk

Do you consider help desk a convenience? If you do, you’re taking it for granted. Help desk isn’t a convenience. It’s a major determinant of customer satisfaction and it can differentiate you from your competitor, increase sales, and boost revenues. But even if you take it seriously, you may not be able to provide it at a high level. That’s typical of many SMBs. These businesses often have resource-constrained IT departments, limiting service. So savvy managers turn to Contracting Help Desk to compensate. It provides benefits that are hard to ignore—including boosting customer service and customer satisfaction. It’s a solution you should consider if you can’t provide exceptional technical support. When done correctly, contracting can make you a market leader.

But there are challenges that come with contracting help desk that you must address to become a leader.

Benefits Of Contracting Help Desk

Contracting provides benefits that can transform your company. In addition to boosting customer satisfaction and customer service, reduces costs and expenditures for capital expenditures.

It also provides access to skilled expertise you may not have, increases in-house efficiency and availability (24/7/375), and improves staff flexibility.

More important, it lets you focus on the key activities of most importance to your customers, boosting customer service.

Put another way, contracting increases productivity, helps you manage in-house resources intelligently, and lets you compete successfully with bigger companies.

Contracting Help Desk Challenges Faced By SMBs

While contracting is a proven solution, it also presents several challenges that you must deal with before moving forward. Outsourcing’s top 5 challenges include:

• Alignment Of Focus

Service providers come in all sizes and shapes. They also have different priorities. So their focuses may not be the same as yours. Find a service provider whose focus aligns with yours.

• Lack Of Well-Defined Processes

SMBs and startups don’t always have well-defined processes. That can throw roadblocks in front of a service provider. Make sure your team’s roles and responsibilities and those of the service providers are well defined.

• Commitment To Business Relationship

You need to find the right service provider, one that’s committed to working with SMBs. Some are. Many are not.

These providers prefer working with much larger firms where they can generate higher revenues. This lack of commitment spells trouble.

Look for a provider that’s not only comfortable working with SMBs but who also values working with them. That way they’ll have a stake in the engagement.

• Track Record/Experience

Check the service provider’s track record to make sure it’s worked with SMBs. Providers who have done so understand the nuances of working with small businesses.

More important, SMBs don’t always have the same level of experience or skilled expertise that larger companies do. Nor do they have the same size staff. Service providers with SMB experience can deal with these deficiencies.

• Risk Management

If you are contracting a help desk, a provider will have access to critical customer information. You need to address this consideration.

Review the service provider’s security procedures and risk management processes thoroughly. This effort can eliminate a PR nightmare later on.

Also, ask the service provider if it has a business continuity plan. If it does, its chances of staying up and running in an emergency are greater. That means your chances of staying up and running in an emergency are greater, too.

Proving topflight technical support services can boost customer service and customer satisfaction. Both are critical to retaining customers.

But many SMBs don’t always have sufficient resources to provide exceptional technical support—the kind of support that boosts customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.

If this is you, customer service outsourcing can help. It offers SMBs a proven solution with many benefits. But to enjoy these benefits, you must overcome key challenges. Doing so can turn you into a market leader.

31West as an outsourced IT help desk company, we bring our proven experience in providing tech support for small and medium-size companies to work for you. Explore further or reach out to our sales team to obtain a personalized quote on help desk outsourcing pricing.