The term “digital transformation” first emerged around a decade ago, building momentum as the evolution of technology itself accelerated. Now, “an estimated 90 percent of all organizations are currently undergoing some kind of digital transformation” — and executives, according to McKinsey, should expect to be “on this journey for the rest of their careers.”
But as technology grows more deeply integrated in business, it’s also advancing more rapidly than ever. In PwC’s 2024 Global CEO Survey, 45% of respondents indicated the need to either accelerate their efforts significantly or risk going out of business—reporting that they doubted that “their company’s current trajectory would keep them viable beyond the next decade — up from 39% just 12 months earlier.”
There are many important pieces to a successful digital transformation strategy and roadmap, but one that may be flying under the radar is a mature and robust IT Service Desk. After all, your IT Service Desk team is the unsung hero of IT operations, ensuring technology across the company runs smoothly, keeping everyone productive.
But, if your IT team is like most IT teams, they’re likely stretched beyond their capacity and over inundated with service tickets and issues. As your organization leans into pushing digital transformation forward, this will only amplify.
Ahead, we’ll explore how IT Service Desk outsourcing can be a transformative solution—helping increase productivity, reduce downtime and costs, free up time to focus on innovation, uncover key data insights, and ultimately help you accelerate digital transformation so your organization can stay competitive.
It takes time and money to build the people, processes, and tools that together create Service Desk maturity. And while most companies don’t have sufficient runway or resources to build up to this point internally, a robust, mature Service Desk is transformative for operations.
A mature IT Service Desk has evolved beyond basic IT support to deliver comprehensive, efficient, and strategic services aligned with the overall goals of the organization. It is well-structured, follows best practices, and continuously improves to meet the changing needs of the business and its users. It’s proactive and uses analytics to prevent major issues. As a result, your organization is more efficient and productive, with less downtime.
When you outsource your IT team, you gain access to expertise on demand. You instantly add a team of specialized IT professionals who fit in alongside your team to handle complex issues efficiently, while establishing and improving processes and implementing effective and proven tools.
Top-quality near-shore IT Service Desk solutions provide 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 budget or team.
Demand for IT talent is high right now, outstripping the supply—which is one reason it’s difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to build a robust Service Desk team internally. But there’s also a need for employees across the companies to build up digital and technology skills. This is particularly true as your organization aims to accelerate digital transformation, as the technology you implement can only be successful if it’s used effectively—which takes knowledge and skills.
Having a mature, experienced and efficient Service Desk team ensures team members who are building these skills have the support they need, whenever they need it. Because these team members are not only knowledgeable and experienced in technology, but also in customer service, they can meet employees where they’re at and help them grow their technology knowledge and skills through the process of issue resolution.
Another benefit: when you add an experienced Service Desk team, they’ll immediately start working to build out the tools and platforms you need to reach maturity. This includes adding technologies like automation and AI to improve workflows, and creating self-service options like knowledge bases, video libraries, and more. Not only does this make issue resolution faster, but it also creates a reliable resource for employees to solve their issues and learn more about technology as they do.
Reliable, consistent service and support is critical for a few reasons:
When employees can always find a seamless path to issue resolution, they’re more likely to retain a favorable view on technology. Again, digitization across the company is only successful when it’s being used effectively—which means driving results. Employees are more likely to lean into transformation when they know they can rely on technology and get support when it’s needed.
Reliable support also has the benefit of improving satisfaction with the IT department itself, which will make the job of advancing digital transformation much easier as other departments will be more receptive to and trusting of IT’s plans.
While it can take years, and double the budget, to build internally, an outsourced Service Desk team steps in immediately to build a multi-channel blend of reliable, live support with advanced and robust self-service options. Through this blend, employees and customers alike can always find a clear path to issue resolution—whether it’s through phone calls, email, chat, or self-service portals. These teams are also focused on tracking key KPIs, such as first-call resolution and response times, so they can continue to make the process more efficient and effective—reducing downtime and improving satisfaction.
A mature outsourced Service Desk team also puts in place proven processes to leverage analytics tools, including AI. Using these tools, they’re not only able to get issue responses under control but also become proactive in their support. They can quickly identify patterns, then investigate the root causes of these issues to resolve them more completely. They can also execute and even automate preventative maintenance, such as updates, before related issues crop up.
The data insights they uncover can also be useful to IT teams as they roll out new technology, continue cloud migration, and more—whether it’s about what type of training and knowledge base materials to provide from the start, so employees feel supported, or insights into how current technology is being used.
Finally, one of the most powerful benefits of outsourcing your IT Service Desk is that you gain a mature, robust Service Desk team—while gaining capacity back for your internal team to focus on strategic initiatives.
If you need to accelerate your digital transformation this year, this is paramount. Most IT teams are already stretched, 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.
This puts companies in a double bind: you need to accelerate digitization, but you’re already feeling crushed by support needs for the technology you’ve already added. You need to free up your IT team to implement new technology, but doing so will also increase support needs.
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.
As you evaluate how to distribute your IT budget then, outsourcing your business’s IT Service Desk is a powerful opportunity for targeted impact, especially when working within the resource constraints that commonly challenge mid-market businesses.
The great advantage to outsourcing IT Service Desk is that it can meet you where your needs are currently, then scale up or down with you—while simultaneously enabling your ability to scale. You can add the amount of Service Desk support you need now, invest in upskilling your internal team so they can focus on moving innovation forward, and increase outsourced Service Desk support during big technology rollouts.
Ready to learn more about Why Outsourcing Your Service Desk is the Smart Choice for Mid-Market Businesses?