Should MSPs Outsource Their Help Desks?
As the managed services market grew up, a healthy number of MSPs decided to outsource their help desks to third-party partners. But now, ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini is calling on MSPs — even small MSPs — to build their own help desks. By having a help desk in-house, small MSPs can build person-to-person relationships with end-customers, while more closely monitoring trends and needs within their SMB customer bases, Bellini asserts. So, what’s the upshot for MSPs?
Once again I’m not choosing sides. But it seems like there are two clear help desk mindsets in the MSP market.
On one side of the fence: MSPs that outsource their help desks and/or NOCs (network operations centers) to third-party providers. Help desk and NOC service providers include distributors and specialists like Live Virtual Help Desk, NetEnrich and Zenith Infotech and master MSPs like Do IT Smarter and MSP Services Network. By leveraging third-party help desks and third-party NOCs, MSPs can focus on more strategic, higher-margin services, proponents say. NetEnrich GM and Senior VP Justin Crotty says MSPs that hold onto their NOCs are dung beetles — doing dirty work that they don’t really need to be doing.
On the other side of the fence: Bellini and scores of small MSPs that keep their help desks entirely in-house. True believers include Steve Winter, CEO of Ergos Technology, an MSP in Texas. During an MSPmentor Live webcast earlier today, Winter described how his in-house help desk managed all client needs — everything from handheld devices to desktops, servers, voice and video conferencing. Equally important, Ergos maintains complete documentation of each client’s environment. The documentation, coupled with vendor management services, allows Ergos to upsell and cross sell new solutions to each customer.
Of course, I’m over simplifying the market. There are certainly some areas of overlap. For instance, CharTec — the hardware as a service specialist — has partnered up with Live Virtual Help Desk. CharTec is a ConnectWise Capital portfolio company.
Account Control
Regardless of where you stand, it’s hard to argue with Bellini’s key point: As big IT vendors sell cloud services directly to end customers, it’s critically important for MSPs to build stronger working relationships with their end customers. Day-to-day help desk interactions allow for that.
So for some MSPs, that means keeping help desk in-house and learning absolutely everything possible about the customer’s day-to-day IT issues and needs. For other MSPs it means outsourcing help desk services in order to focus on new or emerging opportunities that offset potential cloud rivals.
Either way I’m surprised how much chatter help desk services generate in the MSP market. For such an old service it seems to be more critical than ever.
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Most of us were doing helpdesk in-house before helpdesk was cool. We just didn’t realize it–or know how to do it right.
When clients called, we scrambled to get right on their problem. We gave them our cell phone numbers so they could always have a live answer–even if we were at another client site. We did everything to act like a helpdesk–except building a helpdesk.
When my company went from “computer guys” to “MSP”, we outsourced our helpdesk for managed service clients. It really helped us to engage in a deeper way with customers. It also caused us to realize something about our clients we couldn’t convert to managed services… we’re not their helpdesk–nor should we try to be.
To break/fix clients, we’re like plumbers. They call us when they have a leaky pipe, or need to install a dishwasher, and then we go away. We respond as quickly as we can, and do excellent work, but we don’t try to be something they don’t want–a helpdesk.
Hi Joe;
I agree with Arnie as long as delivering service desk to clients and end-users is a core competency of the MSP. By this I mean that they can achieve the efficiencies and profitability of best-in-class service desks through the investments they have made in their tools, technologies, processes and training (the latter for both their internal teams as well as their clients and end-users). Otherwise, their clients may be best served via an outsourced relationship with an organization managed by the MSP whose sole focus is delivering service desk services as their core competency.
After all, service desk is the commodity of commodities nowadays – end users can engage directly with service desk providers for these services. The differentiation that the MSP must promote with their prospects and clients is their strategic capabilities as a virtual CTO that can align technology services and solutions with their clients’ business goals and create effective roadmaps to help their clients budget for and reach them.
After all, who wants to compete for commodity business?
Erick Simpson
MSP University
http://www.mspu.us
Bryan: Thanks for your real-world perspective. Opinions certainly vary on this topic. And I concede: I don’t know (A) how easy or how difficult it is to build a help desk and (B)) what the potential ROI is.
Still, you say you’re succeeding with an outsourced help desk. Steve Winter is succeeding by keeping it in-house… So there’s no single silver bullet, apparently.
-jp
I’d like to add my thoughts on the outsourced vs. in-house dilemma.
One thing that is overlooked when it comes to the choice of outsourcing or not are the “touches” you provide when having your helpdesk in-house. As an early MSP, we went through all the growing pains and decisions that are required of an MSP to be successful or not. One of the major hurdles that all MSP’s will attempt to cross is the fact that if you’re trying to convert existing accounts to an MSP contract, or seeking new business, you’ll inevitably reach the problem of not being in front of your customers as much as you were or displacing the incumbent provider who probably wasn’t an MSP and did most of the work onsite for the customer.
That’s a problem that a lot of customers have to come to grips with – they’re not going to see you as much. We all know the great arguments to provide to the customer for this – i.e. we’re much quicker, efficient, don’t have to roll a truck to you, immediate service, etc. But still… those customers will feel “alone” in your relationship short of business reviews and sales talks in person.
Having your helpdesk in-house allows you to combat some of those problems and add more personal touches. Typically, you’ll be able to have a core helpdesk staff that talks to all of your contract MSP customers. Clients get to know them. They get to like them – and they like to ability not to call a random person sitting who knows where and never talk to them again. When we have our potential or new clients tour our NOC, they meet all of the staff. They put names to faces. That’s a nice personal touch. You can’t do that when you outsource your helpdesk.
There are other things that you can do to. When we’re providing remote assistance, we use video on our end. The customer can see a face – and see what we’re doing. We include pictures of everyone in email signatures that we send to clients. We place followup calls to every call that comes in. These are things that you can’t do with an outsourced helpdesk… or if you could you probably wouldn’t want to.
It’s the personal touches that keep attrition rate low and customers happy. Sometimes if onsite work is required, we might even send one of our helpdesk people out there to the client for that extra personal touch.
Building a NOC and helpdesk is not easy at all. It requires a lot of energy, time and investment in your people. But, I’ve personally worked in two different companies with different helpdesk models for an MSP. The ROI for building your own helpdesk is much greater than outsourcing. Plus, you have control over that helpdesk when it comes to documentation of clients, strategic leadership, and sales opportunities. If you also have a Virtual CIO as part of your managed services offering (which we do) you can hold direct meetings with your helpdesk staff and your Virtual CIO. It’s also much easier to get “temperature checks” of clients and do something about it more quickly.
In the game of Managed Services, the nice guy wins. With MSP’s cropping up everywhere, you need a differentiator. I’d suggest seeing if your helpdesk can be one of those.
We learned the hard way that there’s no way a small company like ours (less than 25 people) can effectively manage a true help desk service for all of our clients, who scale faster than we can, and whose needs are unpredictable and run feast and famine.
I agree 100% that we need to own the relationship, and the help desk service needs to go *through* us. But that doesn’t mean we need to *deliver* the service. I can’t afford to have a full time team available 24/7, at staffing levels resourced to meet the peak demand periods of all my clients.
Instead, I contract with an outsourced help desk service provider, and I use Autotask as the backend platform to drive seamless service delivery and billing. My clients submit their issues to me through the client access portal or through emails that are automatically parsed and converted into tickets. Then, I have the option of servicing the ticket directly or redirecting that ticket to my outsourced provider. They also use Autotask, and as they work the ticket, I get the status updates and so do the clients. When the issue is resolved we have captured all the time and expenses on the ticket, which I can easily bill, and also captures the information I need to pay my help desk partner.
Also, the workflow automation engine in Autotask always escalates tickets to our outsourced partner during after-hours service requests, as well as for specific issue types where we have pre-determined that it’s best for the outsourced partner to handle instead of us. That’s a set-it-and-forget-it situation for us.
John,
I agree with everything you’ve said. I’ve always been told business is about building relationships. Why outsource the chance to know your clients on a better level?
It just helps create that customer “stickyness” we all strive for on a daily basis.
Joe,
You know I am biased, but that being said, size and experience do matter. More specifically, to the previous comments, you need to deliver a quality product. Having run an organization with 175+ people with a full Help Desk and NOC, as well as being involved in smaller operations in my past — process counts. Not only that people do as well and staffing a 7×24 Help Desk requires lots of bodies. In my mind, it is a simple cost vs. expected outcome analysis.
I for one believe that smart-sourcing is the way of the future, and this pertains to much more than Help Desk. Provided that the reseller/VAR/Solution Provider does maintain account control and their outsource partner can offer a degree of private-label to maintain brand, it should work. And yes, PSA’s need to be updated natively, and communications between the VAR and the outsourcer need to be consistent. There needs to be a marriage of sorts. From my perspective, MSPSN aims to be an extension of our partner’s operations – we are their NOC, SOC, Help Desk, etc. – whatever works for their business model.
Lastly, to the logic behind the “build vs. buy” decision. As an industry, our approach for years has been: “We have the skills Mr. Customer, you may not.” “We can do things better and more inexpensively than you can.” “Let’s setup an agreement whereby we: A. Fully support you, or B. Augment your team.” Shouldn’t we eat our own dogfood? Or are we saying that approach is incorrect, and in fact we should instruct our customers to build it themselves? I wonder.
There is no silver bullet, no magic potion, but I recommend that whatever approaches a reseller may take make certain it is well researched, carefully thought out and if you choose to outsource – built upon trust in your partner. If you decide to do it in house, use a foundation of standards, commit to using your best people, and execute – it will be more costly, but should attain the desired result over time. Or maybe use and MSPSN or one of our brethren as training wheels in the interim until you build the adequate revenue stream and competencies in-house.
By the way, I just got off a three way call with our partner, their end-customer and one of our NOC staff. It was a seamless call, all tickets have been updated and the customer is happy. That’s how it should work…
Thanks for driving the dialogue,
Gerard
Gerard Kane
MSPSN
http://www.mspsn.com
As a provider of an outsourced –or in Gerard’s terms smart-sourced (great term, Gerard) Help Desk we are also naturally biased. We often hear that it’s all about losing the relationship with your end client. If that’s your reason for keeping it in-house, then there’s probably little chance of changing that mind set and, if you can build your own Help Desk that’s great and I applaud your efforts – it’s an extremely tough and cost intensive prospect. However, in my humble opinion, the customer relationship is between you, as the principal of your company, and your client. The odds are good that you, as the owner of the company, have done much of the selling and relationship building to get your company where it is today and your clients probably expect to keep that relationship intact so; while I understand that it’s important to have good customer centric support staff, the “relationship” really is all about you, the owner.
As Gerard neatly sums it up, the Help Desk should and, in fact, has to be an extension of your operation. Not only that, but the range of skill sets that should be available from an outsourced NOC or Help Desk will be far wider than most MSP’s would be able to afford to bring in-house. John K has some valid points but as we run a Global service, we obviously can’t “drop by” to put faces to names. We do, however, build a relationship in the terms that John talks about by having certain people be team leads for particular clients – seems to work quite well. In any event, we’re only here to help; so if you can’t afford to build your own Help Desk, or just don’t have the inclination, you know where we are.
Neil Jones
Live Virtual Help Desk
http://www.livevhd.com
Partnering with a help desk provider is an activity as Erick describes that should be done if it’s not a core competency. When you are building a small business, you have to wear many hats, and if there is a way to manage some of them effectively with a partner so you can focus on your core business, it should be considered. Many times the choice of who to partner with to deliver this service is key, and matching values and direction with the right resource is important for easy integration with your business.
Hi All I agree with a number of comments, however when supporting your client 24x7x365 may I suggest this is where a partner programme like Reach Global Alliance Partner Programme can help, by partnering to support your clients during the difficult hours (extended hours) not only compliments your service but gives you a competitive advantage over your competition at a fraction of the cost, use it when you sell it….. Our partners call it selling profit!. Come and see http://www.reachglobalapp.com.
Operators are standing by,
-jp