As 2024 turned to 2025, mid-market companies closed out the year optimistic after a year of solid, steady growth. So far, that optimism remains, but businesses are still at a crossroads, navigating the challenges that come with growth, talent acquisition and retention, rising costs, stubborn inflation, and geopolitical and economic uncertainty—all amid an increasingly competitive landscape.
This puts budgets in all departments, including IT operations, in a familiar spot of needing to optimize performance and productivity without increasing costs. There may even be pressure to lower costs while boosting productivity—a tricky needle to thread.
However, outsourcing your IT Service Desk can help transform operations and deliver more productivity, both for IT and business wide. That’s because Service Desk is the unsung hero of IT infrastructure, providing the essential support that allows you to adopt and benefit from the tech you have and the tools you want. Ahead, we’ll walk you through how that translates to productivity, in addition to many more benefits.
Hiring and talent issues, including recruitment, acquisition, and retention, are some of the most persistent challenges for mid-markets, with 46% of companies having trouble finding the right people with the right skills for the jobs they need to fill. This is particularly true for digital skills and IT talent, as the demand for specialized technology knowledge has outstripped supply. It’s also expensive to hire, train, and retain IT talent in-house, even at the support level.
When you outsource to an experienced IT Service Desk provider, you instantly gain access to Service Desk maturity. This includes a team with that specialized expertise and experience—as well as the proven tools, technologies, and processes they use to handle complex IT issues efficiently. The outsourced team provides the scale, coverage, and resources, so you can provide mature support that feels like it's an extension of your IT team, staffed by specialized IT professionals in your region. All without doubling your in-house team or budget.
Expert problem-solving: With specialized knowledge, Service Desk agents can resolve issues more quickly and accurately, reducing the time spent troubleshooting by less experienced internal staff. Plus, while it takes time and money to build a mature internal Service Desk team, through outsourcing you can gain access to this expertise and maturity instantly.
Fewer escalations: Because outsourced service desks are equipped to handle a wide range of issues, they can resolve problems at first contact, which reduces the need for escalation and further delays in resolving issues.
The terms “IT Help Desk” and “IT Service Desk” are often used interchangeably, but in truth, there are some key differences—differences that make a critical difference when it comes to supporting the business.
While a Help Desk is closer to its origins as a “break/fix” service and provides more tactical support, the team behind a robust Service Desk has larger business goals in mind.
A Service Desk team’s focus is not only on effective, efficient issue resolution, but also on continuous improvement and efficiency. They introduce proven processes and technology like automation to streamline responses, improve how issues are handled, reduce repeated issues, and identify opportunities to enable faster incident responses and create more cost-effective operations with better resource allocation.
As a result? Teams across the company can spend less time resolving technology issues, and more time on work that moves the business forward.
Thanks to their focus on continuous improvement, robust Service Desk teams find opportunities to create self-service tools, shared knowledge bases, and improved workflows through effective software.
One IBM study found that Service Desk software can help reduce IT ticket volumes by up to 80%, while providing a blend of live support and self-service options can help users more quickly find support. This blend also helps to reduce the common complaint that users can never talk to a real person when they need to, by ensuring a clear and easy path to either option.
Other studies show that 72% of customers prefer to use self-service support. Combined with the resulting faster issue resolution, users feel more satisfied with the level of support and are back to work, faster, increasing productivity.
IT Service Desk outsourcing also comes with the added benefit of the ability to quickly scale up to 24/7 support, across multiple time zones, ensuring that your employees and customers can get help whenever they need it, day or night.
Greater reliability: IT Service Desks provide a clear, centralized resource for help with IT issues—and act as the important face of IT for the businesses. As they increase efficiency, business alignment, and provide more options for quick issue resolution, they provide greater reliability, keep things running at less cost, and most importantly, make it easy for users to ask for, and receive, help.
Reduced downtime: When issues are resolved quickly, employees can return to their work without prolonged disruptions. Faster response times translate to less time spent waiting for technical support and more time spent on productive tasks that keep the flow of revenue going.
Global reach: With support teams available in different regions, your business can be more agile, adaptable, and productive, especially if you have remote teams or international clients.
A truly mature IT Service Desk is proactive, providing continuous monitoring and preventative measures that reduce the risk of downtime in your organization. They’ll use tools to identify patterns, so they can identify when there are larger issues, then investigate and pinpoint the root cause and solutions.
For example, using predictive analytics, self-service portals can offer proactive solutions before a user even experiences a problem. The portal might notify a user of an impending system upgrade and automatically schedule it based on the user’s preferences—helping maximize their productive time and reduce security risks.
Greater alignment between business + IT: Service Desks are the interface between IT and the business. When they’re able to be proactively focused, through outsourcing, the insights and feedback they collect can keep IT attuned to employee sentiment and satisfaction. In turn, this can help inform future IT services, enable more strategic decision-making, and facilitate business outcomes like faster service delivery and a smoother user experience.
Pinpoint identification of root causes: By performing analysis on issues and leveraging tools like AI, Service Desk can quickly identify recurring issues, pinpoint the root causes of them, and work to architect solutions before these issues become major problems.
As the CIO at SaaS provider Freshworks, told CIO.com, “The truth is, most IT teams — and employees more broadly — are overburdened by their workload and ever-present demands for growth and higher quality.”
This can be particularly true for IT teams facing a mountain of support tickets, and in a position of constantly intaking, reacting, and multitasking service. Growth in a business can often mean that you find IT service “following some corollary of Moore’s Law,” with IT support tickets doubling every two years.
Your IT Service Desk is truly the backbone of your operations: without the ability to service and resolve technology issues, it’s difficult to scale technology in your business, which hinders continued growth. This affects your internal IT team too. When in-house IT teams are struggling to manage day to-day issues, constantly putting out fires, it often results in your team feeling increased pressure to manage support while still moving strategic projects forward.
By outsourcing IT Service Desk, you can not only get issue resolution under control, but you can also free up internal IT resources to work more proactively and strategically, versus being in a constant reactive state. Combined with the insights about users and the business that a proactive Service Desk team uncovers, internal IT can also better enable business goals and productivity through technology. This also helps to elevate the department’s profile internally, ensuring improved collaboration across the board.
IT should seamlessly support business operations, not get in their way. Yet managing IT issues in-house can be inefficient, costly, and frustrating for everyone, with too much downtime—creating even more pressure on you and your team to improve. It can feel like you’re stuck in quicksand: trapped by the very problem you’re trying to solve.
Outsourcing to a trusted partner with extensive experience in providing reliable and efficient Service Desk solutions can be the key to getting you unstuck. It can even give your mid-market business a strategic advantage, putting every goal within reach.
Ready to learn more about Why Outsourcing Your Service Desk is the Smart Choice for Mid-Market Businesses?