5 Tips for Hiring Effective Technical Desktop Support

Imagine logging into your computer early in the morning in anticipation of a busy day. In the middle of constructing a critical email, your computer crashes. To top it off, you have to wait 45 minutes to get a hold of technical desktop support. By the time you connect with an IT support agent, you’re on hold for another 30 minutes while they attempt to fix your problem.

Meanwhile, you have missed at least one meeting, and when you finally get everything resolved, you feel lost and bogged down by all the work you missed.

You could have saved yourself and your people lots of heartache by selecting the right technical support provider for your company’s needs. No matter the type of company you operate, robust information technology support is key in ensuring your hardware and software are functioning as they should. Since not all companies offer similar services and resources, here are five tips to help you locate the technical desktop support provider that’s right for your company.

What is Technical Desktop Support?

With traditional desktop support, you connect with someone to assist with run-of-the-mill tasks. Think password retrieval, printer driver installation, application installation, and the like. Some of this work can be done remotely, while some might require an in-person examination. But they’re all typically day-to-day issues that just need to get fixed fast so you can do your job.

On the other hand, powerful technical desktop support requires in-depth assistance with its hardware, software, and full-blown IT infrastructure. These professionals can address your concerns at an in-the-weeds systemic level while also guiding a big-picture advisory capacity. We’re talking about integration, remote connectivity, due diligence, processing potential, cybersecurity, and more.

How is It Different from Help Desk Support?

Classic help desk support and your traditional desktop support technician are two sides of the same coin. The former serves as a conduit for connecting you with the help you need, while the latter is frequently the person who does work at a granular level.

While all of these roles involve technical know-how and considerable customer service acumen, technical desktop support typically handles more detailed assignments in more complex systems.

It is truly a matter of capacity and scale.

1. Determine Your IT Needs

Before scouring the internet for help, you should first conduct a thorough internal investigation into what your company requires from an IT support perspective. Such an examination should involve senior leadership, department heads, and possibly involved investors so that you have the broadest possible view of any potential demands.

Your internal assessment will examine factors, such as:

• Employee technical acumen
• Current software & integrations
• Current hardware
• Customer needs
• Current projects
• Projected growth

The better you can identify your daily and future expectations, the more prepared you will be to complete the following steps. By completing this review first, you provide your company with a firm footing to make the best possible choice for the right reasons. Your company’s IT requirements should guide the IT solution you choose, not the other way around.

2. Do Your Research

Since one size never truly fits all, don’t jump the gun and “go all-in” on a full-blown enterprise package for your technical support concerns. Even if your favorite thought leader loves a particular company or software, and no matter how many times you see one advertised in trade journals, they still might not be suitable for you.

By first documenting your actual business needs, you have a clear guide for your quest. Talk to your peers, prepare for thorough interviews with potential providers, and use your documented business requirements as a measure against which provider is the best fit.

3. Know Your Budget

You need to know how much you’re willing to spend and be ready to turn away higher-priced services. You don’t want to find the seemingly perfect desktop support partner and later learn they’re way outside your price range. The last thing you want to do is over-pay for a managed service provider you need but then can’t use effectively because of a budget crunch in other areas of the business.

A worthwhile outsourced IT provider will want to match its capabilities to what you need and can afford. By being upfront and transparent with your expectations and capacity, they might even be able to craft a custom package for you.

4. Analyze Your Long-Term Plans

You want to grow and create a grand future ahead for your company. You should take a big-picture view by teaming up with a technical services company that can grow with you. Consider situations such as:

• Customer growth
• Employee growth
• Product development
• New locations
• Enhanced IT infrastructure
• Expanded service offerings
• Increased market activity

With a clear idea of where you want to be in one, three, and five years, you can pick an IT support company that better matches those goals and can meet them with ease.

5. Create Specific Technical Questions

Once you know what you need and the service provider that might be the right solution, you can then devise a unique set of questions to ask the companies you’re interviewing. Such queries depend upon the immediate context of your business, so we can’t provide the precise wording for you. However, we can recommend the following categories as a guide.

• Communication – What options do they have for connecting with customers?
• Know-How – How much can they do?
• Remote – What is their balance of in-person and distance help?
• Workflow – What are their processes for completing a task from start to finish?
• Customer Service – How do they actually talk to customers?

You want to get clear and direct answers to your questions so that you can then compare and contrast them during your internal review and approval process.

Technical Desktop Support is Vital to Keep Your Business Running Effectively

Outsourcing your IT is more than just getting help with printing a document or ensuring your company email won’t get hacked. Those tasks are important, but your business needs a vigorous technical desktop support company to minimize business disruption. They will meet your business technology needs by delivering comprehensive solutions and not just fixing daily issues.

The EAG Inc. IT team truly is a one-stop shop for all IT needs in the oil and gas industry – our goal is to optimize IT for our clients, and we continue to refine our skills and expand our knowledge base to enable their long-term success. Contact us to learn more.