Harbour IT 24x7 Service Desk Launches

As businesses increasingly operate globally, and employees value flexibility, the traditional work day has expanded. Operating your internal IT service desk to cover all users in all time zones at all the hours they might be working is costly û both in terms of financial outlay, and the toll it takes on your support staff. Extensive out-of-hours rostering is known to increase staff dissatisfaction, increasing turnover, which is expensive and disruptive. Harbour IT's Service Desk lets you offer your users after hours support, without incurring crippling human resource costs.

Here's how it works

During core business hours, when your support desk is staffed by your people, employees with an IT problem call the support desk directly. Outside those hours, we can divert calls to the afterhours service desk, monitor your email requests, or they can call the Harbour IT service desk directly. Highly-skilled Harbour IT support staff attend to the problem, resolving it on the spot or escalating it as necessary. At the end of the month, you receive a detailed report outlining support activity for the month, including numbers of calls, average resolution time, trends compared with previous months and more.

Pricing is scalable to reflect the number of calls serviced by Harbour IT, so you're not paying a large overhead for a facility you might never use.

Quantifying Your Savings

It's easy to underestimate how much providing out of hours service desk support costs. Here's how to determine a realistic figure:

Calculate how many hours you're providing support for:
- 24x7 support is 672 hours/month
- After hours support Monday to Friday is 420 hours/month
Weekend and public holiday support is 192 hours/month. Remember, the after hours and weekend figures are in addition to your regular Monday to Friday business hours of 160 hours/month!
Determine how many support staff you need to cover the load.
Work out an hourly rate per support staff member, based on their average salary rate. Remember to multiply to allow for overtime rates.
Multiply the hourly rate by the number of hours you're covering to determine a monthly support cost. Did that surprise you? Staffing costs alone can be huge. Finally, divide the monthly staffing cost by the number of support calls lodged to determine a cost-per-call.

We'll help you choose the Harbour IT Service Desk option that will maximise your savings.

About Harbour IT

Harbour IT specialises in IT infrastructure management and support services. Founded in 2001, we have a solid history providing services to businesses in Australia and Asia. Our service desk operators are experienced IT support staff, many with vendor certifications. They are trained in our own ITIL-based best practices, and follow our well-established methodologies to ensure fast resolution to most problems on the spot.

How You Benefit From Using Harbour IT's Service Desk

Feature	Benefit
Highly-trained Harbour IT support technicians available 24 x 7	Your staff have immediate access to technical support whenever they need it. You let us know the hours you want us to cover. No need for you to attract, train and retain staff to cover out of hours support.
Overflow and backup	In addition to regular out-of-hours support, we can offer you overflow and backup services to cover busy periods or staff leave.
World-wide support	Wherever your users are, they're only a phone call, email or website away from help. Whether they're based in Australia, Asia or travelling to other parts of the world, we have them covered.
Multi-lingual support	Your users can get help in their native language, vastly reducing frustration levels and the time taken to resolve problems.
Customer service and technical support	Our first, second and third level support offerings cover the entire support call lifecycle û from answering the phone and dealing with simple problems, to escalation through to vendors' technicians if required.
Fixed price agreement, no capital expenditure	There are no budgetary surprises, and no overheads like staff training, annual leave or sick leave. There's no hardware cost, or support desk infrastructure to set up or extend.
Secure web-based remote control tools	Our support staff can remotely access your systems for troubleshooting if required, without compromising system security. Remote access leads to faster problem resolution without travel costs.
Service Level Agreements	Agreed service levels match your business requirements.
ITIL-aligned systems and processes	Our offering is based on best practices to ensure efficiency and consistency of service.
Job tracking and reporting	Full logging and tracking of incidents lets you understand issues arising in your environment, so you can fix them at source.
Detailed monthly reporting	Understand the issues that arise and their frequency; learn which staff or sites need most support; perform trend analysis to gain an understanding of your future support needs.