7 Reasons to Outsource IT Support

These days, outsourcing non-core activities is simply business-as-usual: it’s just the way that things are done. Security, facilities management, catering—all these and more are routinely outsourced. IT support services, however, are rarely outsourced. But should they be?

Yet in fact, outsourced IT support makes a lot of sense. Lower costs, 24/7 proactive access to experts, help always on hand, support that’s flexible and scalable—the arguments in favour of outsourced IT support are compelling, as a growing number of businesses are discovering.

Let’s take a look.

Outsourced IT support costs

Managing an in-house IT team can be expensive. There are recruitment costs, training costs, administration costs—and of course all the usual employment ‘on costs’ such as pensions, National Insurance, and so on.

There are also the costs of flawed recruitment and retention decisions: making the wrong hire can be a costly business. And yet, in a tight employment market, employers are often under pressure to take risks and hope that people will grow into the role.

With outsourced IT support services, all of these problems disappear. Your business gets the IT support that it needs—and the costs and challenges of managing that support are in the hands of your outsourced IT support provider.

Delivering IT support might not be your core business activity. But it is the core activity of your outsourced IT support provider. Furthermore, IT support pricing models are flexible and mean you only pay for the support you need.

Expertise always on hand

IT never stands still: technologies are always evolving and improving. But that means that the skills and abilities of your IT support team also need to evolve and improve.

But in what ways? How? And at what cost? Waiting until a business-critical system has been deployed is too late to think about how to support that system with appropriate expertise. Yet investing in providing training that might not be required is costly and inefficient.

Once again, let your outsourced IT support provider handle the challenge. For them, upskilling and training IT support specialists is a core activity.

Meanwhile, your business benefits from having skilled expertise always on tap.

Access the latest technologies

The systems and technologies that your business relies on today are almost certainly very different from those of five years ago, or ten years ago. To stay ahead, innovation is essential.

But evaluating potential innovations is time-consuming, costly, inefficient, and error-prone. Is a potential innovation simply not right for your business—or was the evaluation of it flawed, or hampered by an inability to effectively use the innovation in question? Time and again, businesses decide against a particular technology or innovation, only to scramble to catch up later.

With outsourced IT support, having access to knowledgeable experts sidesteps such dangers. Already familiar with innovative technologies, they can make sure that your business’s evaluation of them is sound and effortless.

Make the right decisions about your business’s technology roadmap—and make those assessments quickly, and accurately.

Flexible and scalable IT support

It’s a fact: a business’s need for IT support varies considerably. The introduction of new systems or technologies can see demand spike sharply. Likewise with opening new offices, warehouses, branches, or factories. Acquisitions add to IT support workload, as whole systems are migrated.

After a while, employees understand how to use the systems and technologies in question. But until then, call levels to IT support are high.

But how does a business staff for such variable demand? Staff up to meet the peaks in demand, and IT support staff will be under-utilised at times of low demand. Staff to meet ‘base load’ demand, and the costs and consequences of employees struggling to work with business-critical systems while they wait for help can be considerable.

The solution? Leave the provision of IT support to your outsourced IT support provider. Handling the IT support needs of multiple businesses, the outsourced IT support provider typically sees peaks and troughs in demand average out across its operations.

Support staff are properly utilised—and yet client IT support service level requirements are reliably met.

24/7 proactive support

Businesses are no longer 9am–5pm, Monday to Friday affairs. Branches may operate on Saturdays or even all weekend. Flexible working can see office staff working remotely, or well into the evening. Warehouses and factories may work around the clock.

And with employees and their systems working outside 9am–5pm office hours, restricting IT support to 9am–5pm office hours deprives employees of IT support when they might need it most.

The solution? Your business, if it’s like most, will probably rely on out-of-hours IT support delivered through IT support staff being on call, often on a rota.

But being awakened by a phone call at 3am is no joke. So too is working all weekend, or being unable to plan weekend social events through being on call. While such arrangements might work, they tend to be unpopular—and often costly.

A better solution? Rely on an outsourced IT support provider for your business’s IT support. A provider with proper 24/7 IT support capability, rather than an in-house jury-rigged ‘on call’ capability.

Detailed reporting

Which aspects of your business’s key business-critical systems do employees typically struggle with most? Which parts of the technology landscape are most unreliable?

Such questions provide vital information. Because if you know where people are struggling to engage with systems, targeted training can help. Or those aspects of systems re-written. Unreliable technology can be replaced, with targeted investment.

Yet typically, businesses capture such valuable information only patchily, if at all. As individuals, IT support staff know the answers, but that’s not the same as having a detailed picture right across the business.

But getting that detailed picture calls for systems designed to capture, record, analyse, and present data on IT support calls.

You could build such a system, to be sure. But with an outsourced IT support provider, you’d likely get it as a standard part of the service.

Because certainly, that’s the case with the outsourced IT support provided by us at Aspire Technology Solutions for our clients.

World-class service

How to select an outsourced IT support provider? When you’re buying skilled support for your business-critical systems and technologies, we believe that quality of service is paramount.

And so do our existing IT support clients, who collectively give us a Net Promoter Score of +82—in other words, a rating of ‘world class’.

Talk to us about how we might help your business with its IT support requirements.