COVID: The Lingering Toll on Your Internal IT Help Desk

COVID and the work-from-anywhere business model it triggered has turned the traditional idea of IT support desks upside down. Heading into the pandemic, most companies had Disaster Recovery Plans in place, but they definitely didn’t include “break glass in case of global pandemic.” Work from home as a long-term solution wasn’t a concept most firms were thinking about, let alone implementing prior to 2020.  

Then suddenly it was, and the window of time that IT departments needed to support a distributed workforce went from six months to a year, to two years, and more. Traditional approaches to end-user support are forever changed. Add to that The Great Resignation and the lasting effect on in-house IT departments hasn’t been great: costs are up, turnover is high, service quality is fluctuating, and satisfaction is down. 

Agio Global Service Desk is the scalable answer to your post-pandemic problems. We’ve paired human brilliance with AI to provide fast, reliable service while improving the security of your IT systems. Our investment in predictive analytics empowers our support team to deliver custom support solutions tailored to fit your needs, while freeing your team to focus their talent and time on building more value for your firm.  

Slow Help Is as Good as No Help

Pre-pandemic, with employees in the office, an insourced IT department made sense for many firms. Fast hyperlocal help, excellent customer service, and controlled costs were perks of having IT support teams onsite. When COVID hit, that model was strained by the complications of serving a distributed virtual workforce.  

Securing, tracking, and maintaining devices (both company-owned and personal) added layers of complexity to what had been fairly routine tasks pre-pandemic. Help tickets increased, and response times lagged–no more stopping by someone’s desk for a quick fix. Nights and weekends proved to be particular pain points that led to burnout.  

Then came The Great Resignation. Internal teams found themselves dealing with gaps in quality of service because their staff was departing faster than they could source replacements. It’s not hard to see why the focus shifted from providing an elevated user experience to just trying to keep up.  

These two major changes made it clear that the perks of an in-house IT help desk aren’t perks anymore. Costs are higher, the support model is more complex, and help is slower to arrive. The cost/benefit calculation of an internal support desk has completely changed, and firms have started rethinking what a help desk in a post-pandemic world should be. 

The Better, Smarter Service Desk

Agio Global Service Desk is a support desk-as-a-service at scale that prioritizes first-touch resolution and customer satisfaction. You get a 24×7, follow-the-sun IT solution that’s universally accessible from any device, so no matter where your users are, they have access to help (yep, nights, weekends, and holidays, too).  

But we don’t just provide an outsourced Help Desk—that implies you’re simply hiring Agio staff to do your firm’s job. As your partner, we provide much more than that: a service supported by data science, knowledge automation, and actionable intelligence. 

We’ve invested in AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) to capture and put more information into our help desk agents’ hands so they can be proactive in forecasting and identifying issues before they become a problem for your team. When an issue does emerge, our technology-driven support model enables us to address and resolve the issue more quickly. You get reliable, consistent user support because we create predictable, repeatable processes. 

We’re committed to minimizing disruptions. When problems are pre-empted or solved in real-time, your people can get back to work faster, and your IT team can devote more of its time concentrating on the strategic projects that move the bottom line forward for your firm. It’s maximized productivity all around.  

Best-in-Class Service and Better ROI

When you outsource something as essential as end-user support, you’re going to have some concerns (and rightfully so). Familiarity with your team, your business, in-house operations, and more are significant hurdles some third-party vendors can’t overcome. 

We agree that it’s paramount for your partner to understand your business, your products, your software, and your processes. How else would a partnership work? Agio has built a deep industry-specific expertise on key service requirements across the industries we serve. To deliver the level of service we know you expect, we must be experts in what makes our clients tick.  

 When it comes to cost, other managed IT companies have a more is more approach to pricing—more ticket volume means more time supporting (and more money). Your inefficiency is their cash cow, and they’re more than happy to wait for problems to pop up. They’re reactive, not proactive. 

We’re not fans of that model for two reasons.  

1. More problems shouldn’t mean more money. We offer scalable pricing because we have the team and system in place to serve firms like yours with the help desks you need.  
2. Service desks should be proactive. Agio Global Service Desk focuses on prevention instead of reaction because break/fix is too late—you want to decrease downtime, not increase it. When we’re supporting your team, we can recognize events that will lead to disruption or device failure and intervene before we see the failure occur—reducing support cases and saving you time and money.  

Find out if you’re overspending on IT. 

Make Your Move 

COVID really did a number on internal IT support teams. Work-from-anywhere has added cost, complexity, and risk as teams and devices are spread out. And the Great Resignation has added tremendous strain to a firm’s ability to deliver quality end-user support consistently. Less staff and more turnover mean a heavier lift for the available IT engineers, and many departments can’t keep up. 

Agio Global Service Desk is the next-gen help desk that increases productivity, decreases risk, and reduces costs. We’ve built a 24×7 help desk to move you beyond the day-to-day strain on your internal IT department and evolved the service to move beyond the break/fix model by focusing on identifying and preventing problems before they emerge. Around-the-clock support solves your problems quickly and consistently so your team can get back to work sooner. 

Want to get started? Have questions? Connect with us. We’re here to help.