With all that’s going on in the marketplace and world right now, it’s no surprise that logistics and trucking companies are looking to reduce their costs. One of the fastest ways to do that is through outsourcing IT service desk operations.

The Benefits and Risks of Outsourcing Your IT Service Desk Operations

One of the most common areas to outsource is the IT Service Desk, and for good reason. Low-level IT support is easy to train with good ITIL Knowledge Management practices and a robust ticketing system and call center software.

Benefits to Outsourcing Your IT Service Desk Operations

• Reduced operating costs (salaries, taxes, benefits)
• Less strain on recruiting to keep up with talent churn
• Shift some management and reporting duties to outsourced team
• Get outside eye on service desk operations, leading to process improvement
• Outside team forces your organization to review documentation
• Increase internal team bandwidth for other projects
• Scale outsourced team quickly when there is more demand
• Bring in talent trained in best practices and experienced in tech
• Enforce accountability through contractual obligations
• Cost savings due to needing less office space or hardware
• Ability to source obscure talent easily, such as Spanish or French speaking or knowledge in a legacy application like AS400 or a product like Oracle Transportation Management

Risks of Outsourcing Your IT Service Desk Operations

• Initial loss of momentum due to training an outside team
• Internal conflict if everyone internally is not ready to have their “bad habits” exposed to an outsourced vendor
• Delay in approving new processes and procedures
• Potential downtime if MIR and other critical processes and procedures aren’t communicated properly
• Lost time in micromanagement that could be spent elsewhere if there is a trust issue between the IT service vendor and the internal organization
• Communication issues if there is a language barrier
• User seats and licensing will still need to be granted to outsourced staff for your ticketing and call center tools (BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, Genesys, etc..)

To reduce the risks, it’s important to choose an outsourced partner that understands ITIL, your industry, and how to acknowledge and mitigate the challenges that come with bringing on a new team.

Read our Application Support Case Study to see how we helped one transportation company support their legacy applications 24/7/365 >>>

What this Means for Your Bilingual IT Service Desk

One area that more companies are exploring as the country becomes more bilingual is exploring outsourcing their bilingual IT and service desk support. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the United States will have 138 Million Spanish speakers by 2050. As it stands, the United States has the second highest concentration of Spanish speakers in the world, after Mexico.

What this means for transportation companies is that more and more, their drivers, warehouse staff, and end users are Spanish-speaking and want to get Spanish language help.

What we’ve seen is that the difficulty for organizations isn’t so much in finding Spanish-speaking individuals who could work a service desk call center. The problem is in finding qualified, ITIL-aware service desk agents who speak Spanish whose rates fit the new “COVID-19” budget restrictions.

The other problem our clients run into is that service desk requests and incidents don’t just come in during 8-5; they come in at all hours, 24/7/365. Done right, this means that the organization needs to find, train, and pay for a Spanish-speaking service desk agent (if not several) across all shifts. At minimum, this is 3 agents; done well, it could mean dozens depending on volume. And all of those have to be trained and retained at affordable rates.

How Aptude Can Help

This is where we come in. Even if you don’t outsource the rest of your service desk, we can provide you with a Spanish-speaking service desk support at reasonable rates. You can pay for half a shift or per ticket, and rest assured that not only do you not have to source this staff, you will be able to scale up or down with demand as needed because your resources are shared among multiple clients. You can rest assured we will take care of the sourcing, training, and scheduling for you.