Benefits of an In-House support team

Providing high quality IT Support has become an essential part for smooth running of almost every successful business these days.

There are many benefits of an in house support team in addition to building expertise as follows:

• The primary benefit of having in house support team would save company cost over outsourcing. Moreover, this will also help increase the knowledge level of employees and adding value to the capital expenditure that enhances productivity and efficiency.
• Builds strong research expert team who go beyond a pure research function and evaluate key strategies and findings, essential and beneficial for the company.
• Availability of experts when required rather than waiting to contact an external SME when the application support is outsourced
• Reduces the dependency on the support from external sources
• Develops a deep insight of how IT systems are related to your business needs and thus have full time available expertise to solve problems and put forward appropriate improvements.
• With internal resources on application support, it is also possible to juggle between support of multiple applications depending upon where the spike is and which request / issue needs priority over the others. This becomes tedious when have an external support team as monitoring minute by minute activities of resources is difficult if not impossible.

Managing team size as per the business needs

If you have a small company with simple support needs, a single employee could take on IT support but for a larger organization a proper technical support team will be needed. Another option is recruiting the employee with the correct skill set who can fit into this role with minimum monitoring. This incurs recruitment and training cost which is significant. In either case, responsibility needs to be clearly defined. It is more cost effective and better for the organization to have internal employees being trained. This reduces the cost of hiring because the IT support staff knows what is expected out of them. It can also help you identify any gaps.

The technical support mix

With recent trends companies opt for combining  in-house expertise with outsourced IT support services. Your in-house staff can offer technical help whenever possible. Internal support team could take on the tactics – leveraging their intimate knowledge of your day-to-day business operations and needs – while outsourced IT consultants help to implement a powerful strategic foundation for sustainable growth through technology.

 About Author:

Mohini Bhandari is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at mohini.b@spluspl.com