What are your tips for transitioning to an outsourced help desk solution?

I strongly suggest help desk service should be in-house . This will help more to connect with customers closely and putting answers to their queries . And It should not be outsourced . Its your company , your product & services and the ticketing solutions should be in-house to get more response for the products & services you offers. There are many SAAS web based help desk solutions & it is easy to use and implement the help desk system for your company. I recommend AJ Help Desk which is the best web based help desk solutions with robust ticket support.

http://www.ajhelpdesk.com

Transitioning to an outsourced help desk is a process, not an event. There should remain a core group in the internal help dek as the outsourcer gets familiar not onlly with the product or what is being supported, but the way in which any particular company does so. I like to see benchmarking reports from the outsourcer 3 months, 6 months,etc. to see how they are doing.

And most importantly, ask your end users what their experience is with the new support desk. You might be surprised by the answer.

Michael,

Having been accountable for this transition a few times - both to an outsourced solution and an offshore (but still in-house) organization, there is far more best practice to share than can be included in a post like this. That said, the core elements to be folded into consideration for outsourcing include for outsourcing:

1) Be clear about your targeted end state and design processes accordingly - Eventually some degree of support will have to return into your organization. With that in mind the new interactive and hand-off processes/governance must be defined and tested using original process performance benchmarks.

2) Ensure you use customer-focused success measurements and KPIs for the project to protect the Customer Experience during the transition - too often companies use only the financial outcome/savings realization as an indicator of success and think they've done a great job while the experience goes downhill.

3) Pilot and prove - then grow! As Roseanne said above it's a process, not an event. Begin the transition with a small and manageable lower risk subset of your customer support query base and transition to greater proportions after working out the initial kinks and process/technology challenges that might arise between your two organizations.

4) Add a transitional question to your survey process that will help identify hidden experience changes within the client base. Collect the feedback and use it to fine tune your coaching/tracking of the outsourcing firm.

5) Don't scrimp on the overlap times of internal resources within your parallel runs. Once you move a piece of support, you'll need to run your internal teams in parallel as you transition and bring the outsourced group up to full speed. It will take longer than you originally estimate..it always does..It's far easier to give yourself longer than you need and then move the internal release dates up than it is to push dates out and take a financial hit against your project financials.

6) Insist on continuous technical and soft skill training from your outsourcer during downtime - and expect to create/provide the material on the technical side. Your business doesn't remain static so be sure to plan for the ongoing development and learning of your outsourcing partners. Building achievement targets and learning path progress of outsourced staff into the financial remuneration contract clauses or bonus elements will ensure both sides are pulling on the same rope.

Those are just off the top of my head, like I said - too much to mention here, but hopefully that will spark some other experts to add some material for you!

Brad

Should you choose to outsource your Help Desk - you can find a directory of domestic (USA/Canada) Call Center Service Providers at http://www.camx.ca/call-center/info-319-current-members_ang.cfm?envoyerRecher...

But before you consider sending your Help Desk work overseas - just ask your friends & neighbors about their Call Center experiences.

I’m sure that some of your friends will tell you that they’ve occasionally had the experience of dealing with a Help Desk Agent based in the USA who was clearly a poor fit for the job - and who delivered a poor caller experience.

But when it comes to describing their experiences dealing with a company that has shipped their Call Center work overseas - the vast majority of your friends will tell you that they generally have a hard time understanding – or being understood by the Help Desk Agent – and that their call is typically being handled by a ‘script reader’.

The Help Desk Agent is your ambassador to your technology users. The human voice of the Help Desk Agent provides your company’s human face. Much of the time when your customer calls it is because something has gone wrong. If the caller cannot understand the Help Desk Agent due to accent issues or communicative style - the problems are compounded. The caller can become agitated and your company may wind up losing a customer and future sales. In the present economic environment, just hearing a foreign accent could trip that trigger. Losing dollars chasing dimes is not a wise long-term Customer Support Strategy.

Corporate Social Responsibility is considered an important factor in business success today. Companies are thinking twice about employing workers in countries with poor human rights records - or lax labor standards such as India.

Ask your friends what they think about the exploitation of Labor. Call Center workers in India experience abuse/exploitation to a degree/scale that would be viewed as criminal in some cases by our Courts of Law. For example; Indian Call Center Agents are treated as 21st Century ‘cyber-coolies’. They work graveyard shifts - under high pressure – in work environments where liberal attitudes to sex & club drugs are encouraged & thriving. Colluding employers have set up ‘Blacklist’ data bases - containing the details of their employees - so that “negative insider elements” can be detected at the recruitment stage. Workers are fired without so much as one cent in severance pay.

Overwhelmingly your friends will tell you that they want to speak with a Help Desk Agent from their region - who is typically better able to serve and communicate with them. Probe a little deeper – and they’ll also tell you that they’re opposed to shipping Call Center jobs overseas to begin with.

From the Jan. 2010 Issue of Site Selection: “Offshoring calls to India works in very limited situations. Interaction with clients and understanding the culture & environment of clients doesn’t work very well at all. The direction of the industry is to bring these customer facing jobs back to the USA.”

The latest Labor Market Outlook from the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development in the UK: “UK companies are bringing back call centre operations to the UK from India. Most of the companies that we deal with are looking to keep call centre staff in the UK wherever possible because there is a significant increase in the level of service and customer satisfaction provided."

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