Our CFO asked me to evaluate outsourcing our help desk. The business case seems straightforward. Help desk work is relatively standardised. Outsourcing providers offer cost savings through labour arbitrage and scale economies. We could redirect internal staff to higher-value work.

I’ve spent three months researching outsourcing options, talking to providers, and speaking with peers who’ve made this decision. The reality is far more complex than the simple cost-benefit calculation suggests.

Here’s what I’ve learned about the actual trade-offs of help desk outsourcing.

The Cost Savings Are Real But Modest

Our internal help desk costs approximately $800,000 annually when you include salaries, benefits, tools, and facilities. Outsourcing quotes range from $550,000 to $650,000 for comparable service levels.

That’s meaningful savings, perhaps twenty to thirty percent. But it’s not the dramatic cost reduction the CFO was hoping for. The savings come from lower labour costs and sharing of infrastructure costs across multiple clients.

When you factor in transition costs, ongoing management overhead, and the cost of retained roles to manage the outsourcing relationship, the net savings decrease further. First-year savings might be zero or negative due to transition costs. Steady-state savings are probably fifteen to twenty percent.

That’s worth considering, but it’s not transformational. We’re not going from $800,000 to $300,000. We’re going from $800,000 to maybe $650,000 net after all costs are included.

Service Quality Is Unpredictable

Outsourcing providers show impressive metrics in their proposals. They promise better first-call resolution rates, shorter wait times, and higher satisfaction scores than we achieve internally.

I’m sceptical. These metrics are based on their best clients with optimal conditions. Our environment is complex with dozens of applications and idiosyncratic workflows. Achieving those metrics with our specific context will be much harder.

Every peer I spoke with who outsourced their help desk reported initial service quality degradation. External staff don’t know your environment as well as internal staff. Knowledge transfer takes time. Users notice the difference and complain.

Most organisations see service quality recover after six to twelve months as the outsourcing provider learns your environment. Some never quite recover to previous levels. A few achieve better service, but those are the minority.

The risk is that we trade cost savings for reduced service quality. Whether that’s acceptable depends on how much we value help desk service quality relative to cost.

Knowledge Retention Becomes a Challenge

Our internal help desk staff accumulate substantial organisational knowledge. They understand applications, know common issues, and have relationships with application owners and power users. This institutional knowledge makes them effective.

Outsourcing providers have high turnover. Staff churn through help desk roles relatively quickly. Knowledge that internal staff accumulated over years gets lost or requires constant retraining.

The outsourcing relationship becomes dependent on documentation rather than institutional knowledge. We’ll need far more comprehensive documentation of our environment, applications, and common issues than we maintain today. Creating and maintaining this documentation is real work.

There’s also risk that organisational knowledge that should feed back to IT about user needs and system problems gets lost. Internal help desk staff are valuable sources of information about what’s working and what’s not. External staff are less likely to provide this feedback or have it be acted upon.

Control and Flexibility Decrease

With an internal help desk, I can redirect resources quickly when priorities change. If we’re rolling out a major new application, I can have all help desk staff focus on supporting it. If we’re having an infrastructure issue, I can have them help with communication and triage.

Outsourcing providers work within defined contracts and service levels. Asking them to do something outside normal operations requires contract amendments and additional fees. The flexibility to respond to changing needs decreases.

We also lose control over hiring and training. With an internal team, I determine what skills we need and hire accordingly. With outsourcing, we get whatever staff the provider assigns. We can provide training, but we can’t determine who gets hired or replaced.

This loss of control isn’t necessarily fatal, but it’s a real constraint. We’d need to be comfortable operating within the contracted service scope rather than having complete flexibility.

The Relationship Requires Active Management

Outsourcing isn’t “set it and forget it.” The relationship requires active management. We’d need a dedicated role to manage the outsourcing provider, review performance, handle escalations, and coordinate changes.

This retained management cost reduces the net savings. We’d probably need at least one full-time person focused on managing the outsourcing relationship. That’s $100,000+ annually that needs to be factored into the cost calculation.

Peers who’ve outsourced successfully emphasise that the relationship only works with strong contract management and regular performance reviews. Providers will optimise for their metrics, which may not align perfectly with what you actually care about. Active management keeps them focused on your real needs.

The Transition Is Disruptive

Moving from internal to outsourced help desk requires months of transition. Knowledge transfer, tool access, documentation, training. During this period, service levels will likely degrade as the new provider comes up to speed.

We’d also need to handle the impact on internal staff. Some help desk employees might transition to the outsourcing provider. Others would need to be reassigned or laid off. Managing this humanely creates costs and morale impact.

The transition risk is substantial. I’ve talked to organisations that attempted outsourcing and reversed the decision after painful transitions. The cost of failure is high because you’ve disrupted your organisation and may need to rebuild internal capabilities.

The Strategic Considerations

Beyond cost and service quality, there’s a strategic question about what capabilities we want to maintain internally.

Help desk work provides valuable training ground for IT staff. Many senior IT people started in help desk roles and progressed to more technical positions. Outsourcing eliminates this talent pipeline.

Help desk also provides important organisational connection. Internal staff interact with users daily and build relationships across the organisation. They understand the business context in ways that external staff don’t. This connection has value beyond just answering tickets.

Finally, help desk work provides frontline feedback about user needs, system problems, and opportunities for improvement. This information feeds IT strategy and prioritisation. Outsourcing risks losing this feedback loop.

These strategic considerations are difficult to quantify but might be more important than the direct cost savings.

Where I’m Landing

I’m leaning toward keeping the help desk internal, at least for now. The cost savings aren’t large enough to justify the service quality risk, knowledge retention concerns, and strategic considerations.

The financial case for outsourcing is weaker than the CFO hoped. When you include all costs honestly, we’re talking about maybe fifteen percent net savings. That’s not nothing, but it’s not transformational.

The risks feel substantial. Service quality degradation, knowledge loss, reduced flexibility, and disruption from transition all create real costs that are hard to quantify but definitely significant.

The strategic value of maintaining internal help desk capabilities seems important for talent development, organisational connection, and feedback loops that inform IT direction.

When Outsourcing Makes Sense

I’m not arguing outsourcing is always wrong. It might make sense in some situations.

If your organisation is very small and can’t afford dedicated help desk staff, outsourcing to a provider with 24/7 coverage might be the only viable option.

If you’re going through a major transformation and need temporary surge capacity, outsourcing some help desk work might bridge the gap.

If your help desk service quality is already poor and your internal team isn’t improving, outsourcing might provide a fresh start.

For our specific situation with reasonably good current service, modest cost savings potential, and strategic concerns about losing internal capability, outsourcing doesn’t seem like the right answer right now.

I’ll present this analysis to the CFO. They may disagree with my assessment. But at least the decision will be informed by honest evaluation of trade-offs rather than simple cost comparison. That’s the best I can do.