IT support outsourcing to a third-party provider brings numerous benefits, including reduced costs, access to a specialized workforce, and the possibility to scale operations up or down as required. It also enables organizations to focus on more important projects and revenue-generating programs by eliminating daily disruptions and technological issues.
However, certain challenges can come with outsourcing, and the ability to manage them determines if a company can be successful in outsourcing IT support.
Challenges of IT Support Outsourcing
- Lack of Experience with Remote Teams
Challenge: Working remotely is becoming increasingly common in today’s business world, and the same applies to IT support outsourcing. Remote teams give companies access to a larger talent pool and they allow everyone to work how and where they are the most productive.
How to overcome this:
- State the definition of the project’s success. This applies to a situation where you’re outsourcing one or more projects to a service provider, where one of the most important things is that both you and your outsourcing partner understand what success looks like. If it’s unclear what you want to accomplish at the end, you should rewrite it.
- Show the user journey walkthrough. This encourages the remote team to accept a more user-centric approach and better relate milestones to the overarching goal.
- Over-communicate. You could assign someone in-house who will ensure that the remote team gets all the information they need. Their job would also include noting any changes to the software project and communicating regularly with the remote team.
- Managing Service Quality
Challenge: If the agreement between your company and the service provider doesn’t guarantee a well-defined and mutually agreed on objective, it can be difficult to establish a standard level of service quality from your outsourcing partner. In that case, it’s also difficult to hold your service provider accountable for the expected level of service quality that meets your needs.
How to overcome this: The key to overcoming this challenge is a well-crafted contract with clearly stated and mutually agreeable service-level objectives. The contract must contain your organization’s needs and recognize scale-up and scale-down scenarios that can be serviced by your partner in IT support outsourcing.
Things you should take care of:
- Agree on a custom pricing model,
- Agree on a required first-call resolution rate,
- Decide the required response time,
- Specify the call abandonment rates and call wait times that are acceptable to your organization,
- Specify support coverage that you expect,
- Specify the levels of escalation for different types of support scenarios.
- Slow Turn-Around Time
Challenge: The effectiveness of outsourcing IT support depends on how quickly the outsourced team can adapt and understand your systems and processes to start solving your business’s issues and queries. The challenge refers to quickly and efficiently onboarding the outsourced team, in a way that enables them to take over support operations seamlessly.
How to overcome this: Your internal team must have appropriate documentation to help speed up the onboarding process and knowledge transfer. It should be clear which systems and application support you want to assign to the outsourced team and the time frame in which you want them to be able to take over.
You should also look for indicators of the preparedness, expertise, and responsiveness of your outsourcing partner, and the tools that could help you with that include:
- Having a transition template that they can customize to your needs, and keep track of the transition process,
- Agreeing on an onboarding duration and turn-around time,
- Identifying and making available the resources that they need,
- Clarifying if you’ll acquire dedicated or shared resources.
- Lack of Process and Management Control
Challenge: You might feel uncomfortable with handing over the management of infrastructure and processes of your company to an outsourcing organization, and this noticeable loss of control can feel disconcerting. You should remember that the lack of control is not a risk in itself, but what can arise as a result.
How to overcome this: There needs to be transparency between your organization and your partner in IT support outsourcing about which elements of the management structure you must retain control of. You should specify who is responsible and accountable for managing different parts of the infrastructure.
Focus on outcomes and metrics, as allowing your outsourcing partner to focus on results can provide certain freedom in terms of how those results are achieved.
Ensure reports are regularly delivered because they can be a good way for the outsourcing company to provide periodic updates to the client.
- Data Security and IP Protection
Challenge: You need to be aware of the security risk and implement all necessary measures to avoid damages that can lead to violations of data security and/or intellectual property rights.
If you share sensitive information and vital data about your IT systems, it can result in decreased security. This is why it’s important to outsource to a partner that knows how to handle security and implements plans to mitigate and handle risks.
How to overcome this: Before hiring an outsourcing company, or before sharing any confidential information, you need to enter into a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with your outsourcing partner, following your local IP laws.
Before entering the agreement, you should also review the outsourcing company’s reputation and any past breaches of its client’s intellectual property rights. You should investigate their internal risk measures, ability to protect your IP, and what would their response be to a data breach.
Here at Value Shore, we offer exceptional IT outsourcing services to help businesses of all sizes to achieve their goals. Contact us today, and let us help you succeed by outsourcing your IT needs!
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