Help Desk The Gold Rush is On

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Help DeskThe Gold Rush is On

• Todd Billiar
• Neil Medwed
• August 12th 2008

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Todd Billiar

• Managed services specialist
• Synergy Global Solutions
• Dedicated to supporting Ingram Micro and Seismic
  VARs
• ITIL certified
• Over 20 years IT support experience
• Worked for both large and small VARs
• Managed Help Desk for top 20 bank
• US Navy veteran

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Neil Medwed

• President - Preferred Technology Solutions
• 24 Years in technology
• 22 years managing
• 14 years owning technology firms
• Preferred Technology Solutions is the leading
  advanced technology solution provider in the
  North Texas Region. PTS has great strengths in
  LAN/WAN, VoIP, Citrix, Wireless, Video
  Surveillance, Virtualization and Video. Our
  advanced technology expertise and our managed
  care programs allows Preferred to offer great
  value to every client we meet.

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Become a Super VAR
Using the a Help Desk Neil became a Super VAR
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How Neil is Making Money

• Preferreds experience
• How did they get started?
• How many customers?
• How much revenue and margin?
• Additional tangential benefit derived from the
  help desk he is selling to end-users

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End-user Demand

• End-users are starting to request or even require
  that their IT resellers provide 24X7 tech support
  
• Fueling the demand are e-mail enabled
  hand-helds, VoIP phones systems, wireless
  connectivity, SaaS applications, and
  internet-based business processes
• Current industry trend has help desk users moving
  away from overseas suppliers due to customer
  satisfaction issues

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Gold Rush Help Desk Verticals

• Hotels
• Why
• Education
• School Districts
• Universities
• Small Business
• Why
• Non-profit
• Legal

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Economic Trends (leading to Gold Rush in help
desk)

• Downturn in economy is driving growth in managed
  services business
• We are seeing real-life examples of MSPs winning
  business as a result of end-user cost-cutting
  and/or downsizing
• End-user IT departments are cost centers, with
  somewhat limited capabilities to scale, and are
  not part of an organizations core competency
• End-users who have resisted outsourcing to MSPs
  to keep IT in house are now finally being forced
  to let go and move to a managed services
  relationship
• Help Desk is a service that MSPs are now taking
  over because of the economys impact on end-users

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Gold Rush Technique

• Customers who you couldnt get into before,
  couldnt sell them managed service or products
  previously. Approach them about help desk
• Help Desk as a way to get into new accounts, a
  trojan horse offering
• Get in the door with Help Desk
• Expand it to monitoring management
• Get them on managed services from there

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Help Desk as Lead Gen

• Use data that you are gaining from Help Desk
  support to make recommendations for technology
  enhancements, upgrades, and refresh
• Call avoidance, plus technology improvements
• Get hardware and software sales from that

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How Help Desk Improves Customer Satisfaction

• Single point of contact
• Receive all incident notifications
• Record all incidents in ticketing or PSA solution
• Classifies all incidents and correctly documents
  nature, affected users, systems, hardware and
  services
• Prioritizes all incidents for effective
  escalation
• Troubleshoots according to Best Practices
• Escalates incidents as necessary to maintain
  SLAs
• Maintains consistent communication with all
  affected parties

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Improves Your Company Image

• Promote on your website that your company
  provides 24X7 live-voice, domestic support
• Your salespeople can brag about your companys
  round the clock coverage

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Why Help Desk?

• End-user demand is growing rapidly for 24X7 Help
  Desk
• Seismic VARs are making a lot money reselling
  Seismic Help Desk
• Enhances the service VARs are delivering to their
  customers
• Improves end-user customer experience and
  customer satisfaction
• Growing an internal Help Desk could get costly

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Scaling Your Help Desk Offering

• We already have our own Help Desk internally
• VAR may already have their own help desk, be it
  one full-time person, five full-time people, or a
  team of engineers who rotate coverage
• Do you feel confident your internal Help Desk
  could support a 10,000 user deal for a university
  or a 500 location deal for a retail chain?
• Use Seismic Help Desk to COMPLEMENT what you are
  doing internally
• Let your salespeople go after big deals that your
  help desk couldnt support internally

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Production vs. Development

• Why Outsource
• Scale
• Turnover
• Diversity of technical expertise
• Focus
• Standards/governance
• Tools
• Process
• What to Outsource

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What to keep

• Tier 3 escalations
• Maintain ownership of high-visibility problems to
  manage customer expectations and satisfaction
  directly
• Vendor Management
• Maintain ownership of customers vendor
  relationships to prove value as the Trusted
  Advisor
• Professional Services
• Continue to identify and deliver solutions that
  increase customer efficiency and productivity and
  mitigate business pain and risk

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Lets Free The Client IT Staff

• To focus on more strategic initiatives

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Customer Benefits

• True mutually beneficial business relationship
  based on mutually aligned financial goals.

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Putting It All Together

• Now that I know all this, How do I sell the
  services to my customers?

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Conversation Starters

• Change in IT staff
• Off hours support
• Application roll out
• Cost savings

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Vertical Markets

• They build trust through building repeatable
  processes, both sales and delivery.
• Increase profit by ability to develop repeatable
  processes.
• Improved service delivery through repeatable
  processes.

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Why?

• Scale services much wider without adding
  additional staff
• Improve your service delivery performance and
  metrics
• Prove value as a Trusted Advisor
• Leverage highly-skilled and costly resources on
  more profitable tasks
• Increase customer satisfaction to pave the way
  for easier solution sales
• Increase net profits!

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Help Desk Real-life Example

• End-user looking to cut costs and improve on
  service levels provided by inefficient internal
  Help Desk
• Solution provider in the Northeast sold Seismic
  Help Desk to the end-user which was not currently
  on a managed services contract
• 7,500 in revenue and 1,500 in profit

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Your Role

• Price is not the determining factor
• Prepare your customer for the transition
• Expect bumps in the road
• Set reasonable expectations
• VAR investment in success
• Dont rush the On-board process
• Mass customization is time consuming and requires
  constant refinement

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AgainWhy Help Desk?

• End-user demand is growing rapidly for 24X7 Help
  Desk
• Seismic VARs are making a lot money reselling
  Seismic Help Desk
• Enhances the service VARs are delivering to their
  customers
• Improves end-user customer experience and
  customer satisfaction
• Growing an internal Help Desk could get costly

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