Bring Your Outsourced IT Service Desk Back In-House for Better EX and CX

Employee experience was already one of the hottest trends in IT and IT service management (ITSM) for 2020 before the COVID-19 crisis struck us all. Then, especially because of the large number of employees forced to work at home, it became even more important – with this now continuing in the “new normal” for business that organizations find themselves in. Importantly, employee experience management isn’t just related to making employees happy with the IT services and support they receive. Instead, there’s real business value to the measurement and improvement of employee experience – especially in understanding and minimizing the lost productivity of employees when they have IT issues.

The power of employee experience management

When data is gathered on the experiences of employees, and then benchmarked both internally over time, and against that of other organizations, interesting insights are revealed. For instance, the relative employee experience levels between internal IT service desks and those that are outsourced.

This blog digs deeper into this comparison of internal and external IT service desk employee experience. Eventually questioning whether your outsourced IT service desk is benefitting your organization as much as you think. And whether outsourcing IT support is a good strategy for the “new normal.”

The different experiences of outsourcing

For some organizations, outsourcing works, and works well. It meets their needs across cost savings, immediate access to industry best practice and suitably skilled/qualified IT staff, and the promise of innovation.

For others, however, the outsourcing experience hasn’t worked (or isn’t working). Whether it be that the financial savings never materialized, the supplied service didn’t meet expectations (and maybe even the contractual terms), the expected level of innovation never happened, or a mixture of these. Or, to bring us back to the topic of employee experience, the outsourced supplier just couldn’t meet the expectations of their customer’s employees.

But who cares what employees think of outsourced IT capabilities?

On the one hand, there’s a valid argument that what happens in IT service delivery and support is kept “behind the curtain” and, as such, it doesn’t matter who actually does the IT service delivery and support – an internal IT team or an outsourced supplier – as long as it meets the agreed service level agreement (SLA) targets.

In many ways, it’s like much of what we, as consumers, experience outside of work. For example, with banks, where we don’t care how our bank delivers our banking service. Or with utilities, where we simply don’t care how water, gas, and electricity makes it to our home (provided we get it when we need it of course).

Plus, there’s the business strategy that sees IT service delivery and support as a commodity item. With it considered a non-core business capability that should be delivered to an acceptable level of quality for the lowest possible cost.

But are both of these ‘schools of thought’ really true? That employees see no difference between internal and external IT service delivery and support? And that IT is a commodity item, especially given the high dependence on technology in most modern businesses – with this even truer in the “new normal” for both internal business operations and external customer engagements?

The IT service desk is a good place to focus on when examining this.

Are there significant “quality” differences between internal and outsourced IT service desks?

There’s, of course, no right-every-time answer to this question. As employees, being supported, we might feel that service and support quality dropped after the IT service desk capability was outsourced (thinking that “They don’t know, or care, enough about our business”). But there are always going to be scenarios where the outsourced capability is actually better than the internal capability it replaced. In fact, quality issues, with the internal IT service desk, might have been the reason that the service desk was outsourced in the first place.

All we can do is look at averages.

So, how does the average internal IT service desk compare to the average outsourced IT service desk? And not in terms of SLA adherence, but in the context of the two ‘schools of thought’ above.

Using employee experience to assess IT service desk performance

Employee experience management company HappySignals stated in their Q2 2020 Happiness Score report that:

 “Internal IT service desks are making employees 21% happier and 23% more productive”

With this based on over 818 thousand pieces of employee feedback between November 2019 and April 2020. So, it’s a sizable sample, to say the least.

Now your organization might not care whether its employees are happy with the IT service and support they receive (from either an internal or external IT service desk). But surely it must appreciate that if an outsourced IT service desk is making employees significantly less productive – because IT issues are taking longer to fix than with internal IT service desks – then there’s cause for concern. That this must adversely affect business operations and potentially business outcomes.

Now let me repeat that HappySignals statement again in a truncated way:

“Internal IT service desks are making employees 23% more productive”

Can you truly read this statement, in terms of the productivity lost due to IT issues, and not think that there’s an unwanted downside to outsourcing your IT service desk? And remember, this data represents the pre-homeworking world, where employees could rely on their office colleagues for help with many issues. Then the important question is: Does this downside negate the potential benefits that drove, or are driving, the decision to outsource your IT service desk?

The reality is that you won’t know unless you’re measuring the right things. That while your current, or future, outsourced provider is providing a monthly service level management report that’s consistently a “sea of green,” you’re potentially completely blind to any adverse impact the provided service-desk service is having on your employees, their ability to work, and consequently business operations and outcomes.

So, please take the HappySignals statement to heart, mull it over, and then take the time to question whether your outsourced IT service desk is, or is going to be, as beneficial to your organization as you think it is. Especially as the “new normal” for businesses and their employees takes shape.

Have you outsourced your IT service desk with great success? Or have you needed to bring an outsourced IT service desk back in-house? If so, I’d love to know the what and the why. Please let me know in the comments.