“Information Technology has a brand problem. It has lost trust with its customers — from C-suite stakeholders to individual contributors — who have come to associate IT with bottlenecks, frustration, constraints, and cost overruns. In fact, if IT were a consumer brand, it would have been discontinued years ago.”

These were the words of Will Poindexter who believe that Technology needs to be understood as a critical enabler in every part of the organization from the front line to the Senior executives for it to deliver expected value for many organizations. Do you agree with this viewpoint?

For most organizations, the IT service desk is a costly necessity that sadly disappoints management as it rarely seems to provide a good return on investment especially when managed internally. To this end, many organizations now utilize Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that is, outsourced IT service providers as a response to breaching the gap. While this strategy can improve profitability and provide a higher quality service for end-point users, finding the right MSP partner is crucial.

As you begin your search for the right managed service provider, MSP, what are key determining benchmarks to measure against?

1. Effective Resolution Rate

The most effective managed service desk providers should have a good triage process that enables rapid diagnosis and resolution of end-user interactions or tickets. They should increase efficiency by implementing automated technologies that handle routine tasks and eliminate redundant processes. The first step to this is understanding your organization’s unique processes and challenges, thus a Tier 1 support process that is tailored to your organizational IT needs should be established and integrated into your organization seamlessly.

2. Adherence to Industry-Best Practices

An excellent managed service desk provider will not only have a detailed resolution process but will also adhere to industry “best practices.” These guidelines should be engrained from how service members respond to customer complaints on first contact to the complex and sensitive onboarding process for new employee hire.

3. Alignment to Strategic Goals

The true measure of a managed service provider’s success is that they enable your organization to achieve its strategic goals. As you discuss your organization’s needs, ask the MSP vendor how they plan to address specific pain points.

4. Delivers Efficiency Over Time

After identifying how the managed service desk provider will help your company achieve its strategic goals, you need to determine the efficiencies they will deliver over time. Working with an MSP should be a long-term partnership. They should be able to scale and improve upon the efficacy of services as your organization grows. A quality managed service desk provider should not increase the cost of your support services by huge amounts each year. Rather, the marginal cost of supporting each user should slowly decline.

5. Be Customer Service Centric

While your in-house IT team is tasked with resolving a wide array of technological issues. with extensive demands on their time, they cannot always focus solely on the customer service experience. This is where a well-managed service desk provider will prove its worth. A great MSP will view every problem as a customer service issue. Whether faced with an integral application crashing or a new employee locked out of their email account, the managed service desk staff should be able to resolve these issues efficiently. With strategic outsourcing, they should also provide a consistent, high-quality support experience for your team.

6. Implements User-Friendly Self-Service Tools

A managed service desk provider is needed to resolve your staff’s IT issues, it is essential that you empower them to perform a reasonable amount of self-service. With that in mind, seek out an MSP that implements user-friendly self-service tools as part of their global help desk solutions.

At a minimum, easy and efficient service request submission by your staff where basic information on areas needing resolution can be relayed, documented, resolved, and tracked electronically is a necessity. This process quickly highlights major outages as well as informs change management of recurring IT issues.

At Techspecialist, with our almost two decades of supporting fast-growing technology-driven organizations, we have proven to be the bridge between users and technology. Making technology your greatest ally, allowing you to scale your business faster and seamlessly. Thus, we relentlessly innovate IT services to help organizations gain the ultimate competitive advantage: an unstoppable force of happy, productive people. Our team will design your technology roadmap, implement systems that are cost-effective, and ensure you are cyber-security-proof and futuristic in your technology. We are WHEREVER you are!

Call us today via our email:  info@techspecialistlimited.com or phone number: 09 2911443.