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The strategic advantage of outsourcing your IT service desk

Posted November 21, 2017
Help desk

Fast-growing technology companies are in a tight race to the goalposts. The changing world of production, mergers and acquisitions and digital transformation are shifting the landscape. There can be no fumbles. You are pushing your team to fly high and you can’t risk a weak ground game. Yet providing one of the IT essentials – a high performing IT service desk to meet employee needs – is increasingly challenging in today’s environment where growth, disruption and competition devour resources.

There are no time-outs in this game. Downtime is expensive – the Ponemon Institute puts it at $5,600 per minute on average, and an IHS study estimated the cost to North American companies at $700 billion annually from IT problems.

Not only does IT downtime affect your bottom line, it is a drag on employee morale. Many people today accept that user satisfaction and effortless experience are the new measures of success, and factors that hurt your employees’ experience can reduce company loyalty and engagement.

Outsourcing your IT service desk (ITSD) function reduces the costs of IT downtime, while improving the employee experience by making your team both more efficient and more innovative. The right outsourced provider becomes a trusted partner, one who delivers seamless service to your employees, whose IT needs are no longer languishing in trouble ticket purgatory.

Your outsourced support center delivers correctly the first time, improving first call resolution (FCR), lifting the credibility of the whole department and instilling confidence in employees.

When looking to outsource your service desk, growth companies want a partner with experienced, trained agents and the expertise to deploy quickly. For example, Genesys approached TELUS International as they were preparing to onboard a new acquisition; they needed to scale an ITSD to double their IT support for expanded operations while bringing costs under control.

TELUS International had two assets that could make that happen: a worldwide force of more than 28,000 frontline agents with an average tenure of 2.5 years, along with a proven roadmap for standing up Genesys’ service desk in a mere 25 days.

An established technology service hub enables faster adoption of new technology

Even companies leading digital transformation in the marketplace may not have the resources to bring such transformations in-house. The right outsourcer, however, has already invested in building a technology hub that offers the most current capabilities to solve employees’ IT issues.

For example, if you’re thinking of dipping your toe into the artificial intelligence (AI) water, bring in an outsourced ITSD that is fully immersed in delivering AI’s efficiencies (automating routine tasks like password resets, for example), and savings. Going deeper, an outsourcer with an AI-enabled ITSD can reap the benefits of machine learning and human + AI configurations to build ever-more efficient, effective service.

Similarly, an outsourcer offers established cross-channel pathways for handling internal IT needs via omnichannel support. TELUS International has balanced ITIL practices developed around case management efficiencies and built-in capability to integrate across multiple channels, including trouble ticketing, telephone, email, chat, mobile self-service, face-to-face video and kiosks.

Today, more employees are bringing their own devices (BYOD) to work. Gartner reports that BYOD in some organizations in North America may be as high as 80 percent. Your internal IT department can invest either the time and training to keep up – or you could bring in an outsourced innovation champion already delivering services in BYOD environments. At TELUS International, we are training our team members on new Apple and Chrome hardware, iOS/Android cloud applications, and have a partnership with Google where we gain insight into Google Apps, Gmail solutions, Google analytics and Google sheets. Our tenured team members are already supporting any host of devices and platforms.

The same broad experience feeds our self-service capability, and we have developed a library from our 10 years as an ITSD. Our clients find it easier and cheaper to customize our library than create their own.

Trusted partners can align and engage

An outsourcer must also be a good fit for your brand. The TELUS International Culture Value Chain is a proven methodology that demonstrates direct top-line impacts from strong corporate culture and team member engagement. We engage our own team members, while immersing them in our clients’ brand and culture.

The results speak for themselves: 81 percent global engagement, attrition that is 50 percent less than the industry average, with higher NPS/CSAT scores. If an outsourcer is going to help keep your employees engaged, they must be engaged themselves.

Moreover, clients are taking notice. “The thing that stood out is the investment that TELUS International makes in their employees,” says Brad Kiatzumi, senior director, IT services for Genesys. “For me, retention and turnover are areas of great importance to keep continuity. You don’t want to constantly have your Tier 1 staff rotating with new ones coming in.”

The strength of our culture and employee engagement enable us to measure what matters. By delivering professionalism and expert-ready service, we achieve higher rates of first call resolution. By effectively measuring user experience and strategic objectives, we evolve our business and our clients to achieve continuous improvement.

Position your team for success

The benefits provided by an outsourced ITSD – when delivered by a trusted partner – puts your team on solid footing from which they can capitalize on the opportunities and challenges that come your way. An experienced outsourcer enables you to prevent rookie mistakes in a business environment where you cannot afford any.

You can scale to handle increased requests at lower costs, enhancing your stability during M&A activity. Providing credible, competent human help and digitally transformed infrastructure not only builds value and credibility for the IT Department, but also improves your employee engagement, retention and productivity.

Small things can have big consequences. Moving your ITSD to an experienced outsourcer with the right skills and technology can transform your service center needs from a resource-hungry irritant to a strength that positions your team for success.


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