Establishing a Help Desk and Improving Business Performance
How well a business is perceived to be at managing customer relations and
after sales care is a key element for many prospects considering buying your
products and services. Providing a help desk is a visible commitment
to looking after your customers once they have paid over their money and
will help the buying decision to be made in your favor.
Establishing a help desk can be very expensive if it is in-house.
Staff need to be hired and trained, and this represents a very high overhead
that the business may not always require, say for instance, when sales
volumes are seasonally affected.
Outsourcing your help desk means that you can negotiate the level of service
that will be provided and ensure that sufficient resources are deployed as
and when the business requires them. Increasing the numbers of
representatives on a help desk when you are engaged in a marketing campaign
and expect a surge in calls is easily achieved without any long term
commitment. In times of low sales you can cut the numbers deployed and
reduce your overhead. Essentially, you are turning what would be a
high capital investment with a high fixed overhead into a low start-up cost
and variable overhead resource you use as you need.
Outsourcing the help desk allows you to completely control the cost but it
also provides for a quantifiable service standard that can be delivered to
your customers and prospects. You may want a 24/7 help desk that is
available in the middle of the night or simply wish to deliver services
during normal business hours and working days. We can help you
establish a help desk to suit your requirements and provide you with advice
on the levels of service that you need to achieve your mission objectives
and levels of customer service.
Do You Need a Help Desk?
Establishing a help desk, whether for use by your internal staff or customer
facing to field enquiries, can be an expensive project however the benefits
can outweigh the cost many times over.
In the buying decision, potential customers will look to ensure that you are
going to take care of them after they have bought your product or service.
After sales care is a key factor in whether they will buy from you or from
one of your competitors. Providing a help desk is a tangible, visible
demonstration of your commitment to good customer service and that they will
not be left stranded after the credit card payment has been processed.
Establishing a help desk for your staff, commonly used for IT purposes,
makes business sense as the level of expertise that can be deployed is
usually better than what can be afforded by hiring in the skills. More
than that, you are able to establish a quantifiable and objective service
level standard that can be measured and managed over time. This will
help you in assessing the opportunity cost and revenue associated with
running a help desk function.
The major decision associated with establishing a help desk is whether to
have the resource in-house or to outsource the function. If you are
setting up in-house this will require a large capital expenditure to
establish the help desk, and the costs associated with recruiting and
training the operators. In addition, once set up the help desk may not
be utilized as forecast and it is an expensive fixed overhead that is
hitting your bottom line. The alternative is to outsource the help desk and
this represents a low entry cost alternative as the infrastructure is
already in place at the provider. You have no recruiting or training
costs and probably the greatest advantage is that you have complete control
over how the help desk is deployed to your customers and staff.
For instance, you can easily increase the number of operators to handle a
marketing campaign that you expect to generate increased sales and
enquiries, or if the business is seasonal add or cut back on numbers to
cater for these fluctuations. You can do the same with a help desk
deployed for internal use, for instance when rolling out new software or IT
systems, you would expect increased calls as users become familiar with the
new program and cut back the help desk numbers and operation after a
familiarization period.
