We are a small MSP with less than 10 technicians, with more than 20 clients and we want to develop ourselves. We use a hierarchical system in which we do our best to resolve a call on the spot, and our customers have become accustomed to it. Recently, we continued the process of transferring our clients to third-party technical support. It's still in the beginning, so I just saw a ticket sent and resolved by them. Apparently, that customer should be using them, but they're calling us directly anyway, which may or may not be a good sign.
I read enough here to get a hint that this specific help desk (which I won't quote) may not be very good and that it does raise some concerns about the change. When I arrived, they told me that our selling point is that we have a very close relationship with our customers, which sets us apart from larger MSPs that consider them only as numbers. This decision seems to lose our main attraction, our point of sale.
On the other hand, I see that it is an advantage if a team handles outage / repair issues while managing complex and local administration tasks, as I personally would like to work with Windows Server, AD and write scripts as fast as possible. It also seems to be a necessity if we want to expand our business and not be overwhelmed with countless calls.
I recently joined the team and was recently responsible for helping with the transition. Above all, he wanted to know what he could do, in addition to providing the requested documentation, to try to make things work. I realize that the new guy who expresses his doubts will not be very useful, especially if I am not aware of the amount of purchase that we have already invested in the change. So I think the best way to check whether it will work or not is to engage and integrate some clients into the outsourced help desk, so that we can get feedback and see their work.
The other thing I would like to know are the red flags to watch and mention at tech meetings that show that we should be considering leaving the ship or resorting to third party technical support that needs to be fixed. There is also the question of what would be the most diplomatic way to get these customers to call the technical support extension directly. We cannot eliminate our own direct extension, as most of our customers are not yet integrated. However, it wouldn't make much sense to pay for this third-party technical support and we ended up making the first call resolution.
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