By 
An IT Help Desk is a remote support desk operated by a third-party managed IT support provider for users to call when their IT programmes, apps, applications, or hardware are having issues.
By providing your staff with comprehensive technical expertise, which is always available when they need it, an IT Helpdesk provides a break/fix IT support approach. An IT Support Desk offers a team of experienced, trained engineers for your company. They are ready to help your employees with any technological problems.
They may be contracted separately, but their service often comes bundled as part of a larger managed IT support contract.
There are several benefits to using an IT support desk. Here are the key points…
The Benefits of Using A Third-Party IT Support Help Desk
- Speaking with a qualified technical support professional makes it faster and easier to fix IT problems, which can minimise workplace frustration. Less frustration means higher morale and higher productivity, and higher productivity means more profit.
- 24/7 technical assistance increases your operating efficiency by reducing the amount of time employees spend addressing IT issues. If you have decentralised or remote workforce, this is particularly beneficial.
For businesses operating around the clock, 7 days a week it’s imperative to have someone there who can help them immediately when things stop working, even if it’s in the middle of the night.
- With a strong technological infrastructure, your overall productivity can be vastly improved, this leads to an increased ROI and allows companies to stay one step ahead of their competitors. If your employee’s technology works better, they work better and, eventually, they are more productive, and your business is more profitable.
- Having a robust system of IT support in place provides your employees with an easy process to receive fixes while reducing demand for in-house technical services. This eliminates multiple employee downtime. Instead of the boring, everyday tasks of fixing minor software and hardware problems, your in-house technical staff can concentrate on bigger, more strategic tasks and long-term projects.
- They will often be able to solve problems immediately, either by talking through your employees through the necessary steps or by assisting them through remote diagnostic and remote access tolls such as TeamViewer. When remote help is not enough, your third-party IT support provider will be able to dispatch engineers to your site in person to assist with physical hardware problems.
- Incident management is practised by IT Support Desk engineers to help detect potential issues before they even arise by determining the root cause of multiple repeated accidents. This helps you to defend yourself from hackers, remove glitches and solve repeated problems, and avoid IT issues from becoming IT disasters.IT support specialists have experience working with many different industries and likely organizations similar to your business. This can provide a strategic advantage.
- The cost of external support is almost always lower than in-house IT staff and often of better quality.
- Not only can IT specialists help your team, they can suggest new technologies and processes that make it easier to interact with colleagues and work on assignments together. Also, to maximise your investment, they can help to eliminate redundant or duplicated technologies.
- Even if you have an internal IT staff, they’re unlikely to be experts in every field. For your IT workers, additional assistance is available. Mid-size and large businesses collaborate with external IT providers that provide assistance from their Help Desk and provide internal IT workers with an additional resource to collaborate with and help solve IT problems.
These are just the most obvious benefits of an IT help desk, there may be others that are specific to your business or industry. Consider contacting a local third-party IT support provider with an IT help desk. It is always worth asking existing customers of the provider what their experience has been like. Speak with other business owners you know or canvas opinions from other business owners and managers using social networks like LinkedIn.
Many IT support providers also offer additional services such as business telecoms, managed print or disaster recovery. By combining these services under one provider and one invoice you can get a great discount but also have the benefit of having a single point of contact for all your business technology questions. No more being passed back and forth between different providers’ call centres! Your business will have a dedicated account manager who knows the particulars of your company and the different services it uses and will be able to address any issues holistically by liaising between different technical teams and departments for you.
