The Economics of Help Desk Outsourcing
Progent's Help Desk management and co-management services deliver substantial business value compared with building and managing a Help Desk staffed solely by in-house employees. Many of the advantages of Help Desk outsourcing, such as increased computer availability, obviously improve productivity but are difficult to assess precisely in dollars. Other issues, like internal salaries compared to granular charges for external Help Desk services, can be deceptive at first glance. This discussion is intended to examine the major cost/benefit issues related to selecting an in-house or an outsourced or co-sourced Help Desk.

If you have an in-house Help Desk Call Center, you may have to decide whether your business should add people to your service team or outsource Help Desk Call Center services. You could arrive at this point due to a number of common situations. These include:

  • Workforce growth is swamping your Help Desk
  • One of your Help Desk Call Center support staff has left your company
  • You are starting up an additional branch in a different region
  • Work-from-Home users have increased Help Desk Call Center call tickets and created new types of IT support problems
  • Your Help Desk staff members are needed to help with strategic IT initiatives
A single one of these circumstances could cause serious strain on your Help Desk Call Center and as a consequence disrupt worker productivity. If some of these scenarios happen at the same time, your IT support group could have a meltdown.

The Cost of an Internal Help Desk Call Center Employee
It's tempting but misleading to compare the raw salaries of in-house workers with the granular per-minute charges of an outside Help Desk Call Center group. Although costs for an internal IT support person vary from state to state and city to city (e.g., Tupelo vs. San Francisco), most areas in the U.S. are in this range:

  • Typical Salary for Level 1 Technician: $45,000-$65,000
  • Taxes, Benefits, PTO: $18,000-$26,000
  • Hardware Costs: $2,000
  • Software: $1,000-$4,000
  • Office Space, Supplies, Furnishings, Utilities: $4,000-$10,000
  • Ongoing Training: $1,000
  • Total: $71,000 - $108,000
As in the case of any salaried, full-time worker, the true yearly cost of a Help Desk Call Center Level 1 support worker can be in excess of 50% above the base salary. These expenses do not include one-time expenses for signing bonuses, interviews, setup, or job training. They also do not take into account the cost of setting up new employees who soon quit.

In order to make a realistic comparison between the cost efficiency of an in-house Call Center vs. Progent's external Help Desk Call Center services, the costs of Progent's services should be looked at against the advantages. Items to take into account include:

  • Progent bills Help Desk customers for service on a per-minute basis and at a discount: Average price to Progent clients for outsourced Level 1 Help Desk Call Center support services begin at around $18 for each user per month. Granular billing means time utilization is virtually 100%. You only pay for services delivered. Full-time internal workers occasionally encounter dead time that you pay for.
  • Progent offers extended hours support: Progent's standard service coverage is 14 hours per day on weekdays. 24x7 service is optional. In-house Help Desk Call Centers are typically open only for normal working hours. This can impact productivity if major problems arise during off hours. Also, exfiltration threats like ransomware are commonly activated during weekends when IT support groups are thinly staffed.
  • Progent's Help Desk scales on demand: Hiring new in-house IT staff could take weeks or months. By tapping into Progent's nationwide roster of technical support experts you can adjust your Help Desk Call Center capacity as needed. You don't have to fret about finding replacements for people calling in sick, attracting new technical support staff to meet increased demand or to replace employees who leave, or trimming your full-time internal IT staff when business slows. You can easily respond to business activity peculiar to your industry or reflective of the economy in general.
  • Guaranteed responsiveness: Progent offers Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to make sure support calls are dealt with promptly. In-house Help Desk Call Center teams can offer no practical substitute for an SLA.
  • Breadth of technical skills: Progent has been delivering remote technical support for over 20 years. Progent's IT support experts are steeped in a broad range of modern as well as legacy technologies deployed in a wide variety of industries. This range of skills enables Progent to save time and money by delivering rapid solutions to issues that could otherwise be shuttled to a higher and more pricey level of support. In our fast-changing IT world, it is tough on the wallet when newer technologies need to be mastered at your expense. In addition, Progent's expertise makes it easier to foresee and correct budding technical issues before they can disrupt productivity.
  • Access to subject matter experts: Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing and co-sourcing services also provide access to Progent's pool of subject matter experts to offer fast resolution of Level 2 and Level 3 technical issues that are beyond the scope of most Level 1 Help Desk Call Center techs. Progent's ability to come up with the appropriate SME for an advanced problem can reduce the disruption caused by downtime.
  • Enterprise-class secure multi-tenant ticketing and tracking technology: Progent safely shares enterprise-class service automation technology that allows Progent and customers to generate and track trouble tickets, assign responsibility, show the real-time status of problems, document activity, and generate management reports.
  • Help Desk Call Center co-management shares the work: Progent's Co-managed Help Desk Call Center service seamlessly shares service requests between a client's internal IT support staff and Progent's nationwide pool of service technicians and SMEs. You determine how trouble tickets are allocated, but Progent typically deals with Level 1 and Level 3 issues. The Help Desk Call Center software seamlessly ticket creation, escalation or de-escalation, monitoring, and reporting. The co-sourcing model permits your internal staff to provide hands-on support when situations require it and at the same time facilitates as-needed expansion for online support.
  • Have your internal network service group focus on strategic issues: Your in-house IT support team understands more about your company than any external service provider. Utilizing Progent's Help Desk outsourcing services liberates these valuable resources from being consumed by Level 1 support services such as recovering passwords and offers them the chance to work on marshalling technology to provide strategic advantage.
In the last analysis, the top benefit of Progent's Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing and Co-Sourcing service is the reduction of computer downtime. Whether for a single worker or an entire company, waiting for the right IT solution is an expensive activity.

Learn More about Progent's Help Desk Outsourcing Services
To find out more about Progent's Help Desk Call Center Outsourcing services, visit Progent's Help Desk Call Center outsourcing services. To ask about signing up for Progent's Help Desk service programs, phone 800-993-9400 or go to Contact Progent.


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