The concept of investing more into your tech support help desk might not sound costly if you know that many of the trouble ticketing responses can be streamlined. While you’ve maybe had mixed results keeping your IT team organized, your company may need a few more people now for basic Tier 1 tech support.

However, should you hire an on-site help desk, or should you go a different route? Outsourcing a portion of your IT inquiries is your best bet to streamline your operations, plus assurance you’ll receive quality phone agents.

At Westpark Communications, we want to show you how it works if you’re new to outsourcing.

The Pain Point of Hiring Tech Support

Perhaps you’re an IT company or hospital on a limited budget looking for a basic Tier 1 tech support system. While you expect to become more successful later, being in startup mode means you need to stay within budgetary guidelines.

Hiring phone agents to work directly onsite for a salary could cost you more than you want to pay. According to statistics, most basic tech support phone agents make about $40,000 a year.

Having numerous phone agents on a payroll like this could put you in financial jeopardy if you can’t really afford to pay them well. Of course, for more experienced techs, you’d have to pay even more.

You may have to pay overtime for basic Tier 1 phone support since they might become the busiest of your phone agents. These are the ones who handle many of the most common tasks related to tech problems.

Routing Tickets

One common procedure in tech support is an agent creating a ticket that explains what the caller’s issue is. This ticket gets routed to the right department so a more knowledgeable tech support agent can solve the problem.

Challenges sometimes occur in routing these properly if you have an in-house tech support team in place. Without proper training, they could route the ticket to the wrong agent, only prolonging a tech issue someone needs solved quickly.

Lack of proper training is always a problem when hiring an on-site help desk. As Computer Weekly once pointed out, a lot of help desks become overworked as well, leading to potential mistakes from burnout.

When you outsource your help desk, you’ll have an assurance of well-trained phone agents who know what they’re doing. They’ll be able to easily route caller tickets to the appropriate departments so issues are resolved fast without having to wait hours or days for a response.

A call center should also be able to easily set up an IVR for you to cut the costs of the middle man all together.

Data Entry

As simple as data entry seemingly is in tech support, an agent not fully trained could easily make errors. Data entry is a skill requiring fast typing skills while taking information accurately from customers on the phone.

An overworked tech support agent in your IT company or hospital may miss certain pieces of data in a particular case. Or, the agent may not fully understand the tech problem and not describe it well when entering data for the appropriate tech department.

Again, outsourcing allows you to use dependable phone agents who know how to type well while understanding a caller’s tech problem. It takes special skill to dictate a problem into a few sentences so a high-level tech team understands what the issue is.

The same goes with taking basic information like names and other personal information. Misspelling a caller’s name could become a major problem in bringing any sense of trust with new customers.

Troubleshooting Steps

Guiding callers through troubleshooting is one of the biggest challenges of all in tech support. Trying to explain to callers how to deal with a basic tech issue means having supreme communication skills not everyone has naturally.

While online sources like Coursera give good video training on how to handle basic troubleshooting, you won’t know how well your phone agents handle it until in a real-world situation. You may find out they aren’t good at basic troubleshooting skills after all, leading to unhappy customers needing quick tech support.

Through outsourcing, you’re guaranteed a team with proper troubleshooting training and experience. It’s made even easier when entering troubleshooting details into a program like ServiceNow. The latter is a cloud-based program that automates tasks and workflows to streamline how troubleshooting works.

Your outsourced team will work with programs like this to speed things up since time is critical for those needing their tech devices troubleshooted for work purposes.

Password Resets

As a fairly standard tech support issue, your phone support team should be able to reset a caller’s password easily without issue.

Even a small task like this could lead to a mistake if not properly trained, especially a new phone agent on the job. Nevertheless, resetting a password should only take a few minutes when someone is locked out of their account.

Since anything predictable and repeatable can be placed into a phone script, an outsourced phone team will be able to take care of simple issues like this immediately without delays.

Providing Updates on a Caller’s Ticket

Follow-up calls in tech support are just as essential considering some will call back asking what the status is on their tickets.

Good customer service skills are top of mind here, not including efficient technology to find information in a hurry. Outsourced call centers should be able to do an API push to programs like ServiceNow (and ones like it) to get updates on ticket activity. They can locate pending tickets in seconds and give the caller an immediate status report.

Your outsourced call center should also have a Service Level Agreement of at least 90% calls answered.

Finding the Right Outsourced Call Center

Our call center services at Westpark Communication are very diverse, including offering basic Tier 1 tech support. Our SLA guarantees the 90% mark on answered calls, including having skilled agents for all general tasks.

One thing you can count on is being able to save money by outsourcing since we offer no long term contracts, plus plenty of customization for your business.

Along with 24/7/365 service and local agents working in the U.S., you can enjoy top-tier phone support indefinitely for your IT company or hospital.

Visit our website to learn more about what you need in a call center.