Sink your teeth into outsourcing

So I’m watching a new Subway commercial (the sandwich store, not the New York commuting purgatory), and the company has a new sandwich. The descriptive term is “overstuffed.” Other call-outs I remember include “feast” and “satisfying.” Unfortunately for Subway, these words don’t take away from the visual impact. These things make the actors look like they’re trying to stuff a football into their faces. One girl was eating a ‘wich that was literally bigger than her head. In Normalville, we call that biting off more than you can chew. And when that happens in real life, you should take smaller bites … or outsource.

A great outsourcing target is the help desk. Question is, when do you know it’s time to look at an outside source? First indicator might be when your help desk sandwich actually does get bigger than your head. It’s pretty easy to figure out when that’s happened: daily task lists of around 40 things for every help desk staffer; angry users phoning in and yodeling about unreturned support calls (and e-mails and faxes and instant messages); lots of help desk staffer extensions suddenly dialing suicide-prevention hotlines; and no one eating Subway sandwiches anymore because they don’t have time to leave the building during lunch.

But the Big Sandwich reason isn’t the only rationale for considering outsourcing. There’s also the New Sandwich reason: That’s when your company suddenly acquires another. This is a good time to look at outsourcing your help desk, too. Core IT staff will be booked integrating two or more networks, so handing off the “I can’t print” calls to an outsider is a pretty good idea right about then.

Then there’s the Build Your Own Sandwich reason — the one where upper management calls you into that painful meeting where they pepper you with questions about why technology isn’t furthering the various competitive, strategic visions and value-adds, the ones they dream up while golfing at country clubs you can’t afford. This is where IT staffers familiar with the nuances of the company’s business are undoubtedly better off putting on their thinking caps and special project overalls than they are replacing toner cartridges and telling users to try a reboot first.

What to look for in an outsourced band of desktop helper elves? First, I don’t like Web-only support portals. You can get great prices on these, but if users don’t have a number to call (especially the road warrior tribes), you’ll hear about it. Most of the support calls I’ve gotten from suits-on-the-go are about not being able to get to the Web.

I’m not as anti-offshore as some, but if the outfit is outside of U.S. boundaries, you need to insist on a few test calls. And this isn’t just about the language thing (though if your angry users can’t understand the help desk guy, it’s more miffed voice mails for you); it’s also about testing any remote agents that many of these sites like to install on users’ PCs. If little software agents need to talk to far-off home base servers to make this system work, then you should test that before rolling it out.

Last, check for ancillary services. Some of these support outfits are offering ever more services along with vanilla support. Online backup is a favorite; data security, hosted e-mail, and business collaboration tools are a few more. An important one might be direct support for specialized or even customized applications. That last one can be a real boon if your business revolves around one or two really customized applications — but it’ll cost you.

In fact, all these extras will pump up the price tag, but it’s a well-known fact that the calmness rating of rabid user hordes is inversely proportional to the number of different sites they need to hit to get anything done. Seriously. So think about it and crunch some numbers. With any luck, you’ll regain enough time to leave the office for lunch. Then all you need to do is find a Subway and figure out the physics of devouring the football-wich.