No matter how advanced your organisation’s technology, technical issues will always be a significant cause of productivity loss for employees and employers alike. Problems with WiFi speeds, slow or crashed laptops, and applications not working can end up costing your business thousands, possibly millions in revenue losses, especially at scale.

As a ballpark: the average worker spends 22 minutes per day dealing with some kind of technical issue - accumulating in 91 hours, or two full weeks, of salaried time over the year. Apply the maths to your highest earners, or headcount plans, and the numbers are scary.

Investing in gold-standard IT support is therefore key to avoiding downtime, as well as delivering a stress-free employee experience - especially when even a small proportion of your team is remote.

Traditionally, when IT malfunctioned in the office, team members had the luxury of an in-person IT team and did not rely solely on information sharing virtually. When even just a few team members are remote, IT teams can quickly be overwhelmed with troubleshooting over Zoom and Slack, as well as the support logistics challenges that come with team members dispersed across time zones.

That is why we have launched a Remote IT Service Desk; 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

At Hofy, our mission is simple: to help create a borderless working world by removing all obstacles to providing and maintaining workstations worldwide.

Your teams need IT equipment to work - we have turned the mammoth task of delivering equipment to dispersed workers into just a few clicks. Your teams also need that equipment to work at all times - we now provide IT support 24/7/365 so that, no matter what schedule a team member is on, and no matter where they are based, IT issues won’t hold them, or your organisation, back.

What is an IT service desk?

An IT service desk is designed to be the single point of contact for an organisation’s users whenever they experience hardware or software technical issues. IT service desks deal with everything from individual IT issues to whole system outages to ensure the smooth running of operations.

Why outsource IT support to a managed service desk?

If your organisation is too small or early-stage to warrant hiring dedicated IT support for technical issues, you likely rely on “the best person for the job” internally (e.g. a senior DevOps engineer). Every technical issue they are assigned reduces their capacity to do the job they were hired to do.

For many growing organisations, it is more cost-effective and scalable to outsource service desk responsibilities than hire an individual or team of support staff. The average salary for a senior IT engineer in the UK is £45K - plus all employment costs and hardware costs.

One person only has so many hours in the day. Expanding your support team as you scale means more costly hires, plus the time that goes into recruitment. Outsourced solutions, on the other hand, charge a fee per head - cheaper, easier, and simpler to scale.

The final benefit concerns consistency. Who tackles IT issues when your sole support engineer takes two weeks’ annual leave? For remote or hybrid companies embracing international hiring opportunities - who supports your LA-based sales lead while your UK-based support engineer is asleep?

Outsourcing IT support to a managed service provider is therefore beneficial from a productivity, cost, scalability and consistency perspective. 

What services does Hofy’s Remote IT Service Desk cover?

Hofy’s Remote IT Service Desk supports users through minor technical glitches to system shutdowns. Services include:

• ​​Enhanced hardware support for Hofy equipment
• Hardware support for non-Hofy equipment (e.g. “My monitor is flashing”)
• Software support (e.g. “Google Chrome keeps crashing”)
• General IT advice (e.g. “How do I change my desktop background?”) 
• Hofy platform issues
• Advice scoping call to determine other support requirements
  

What are the benefits of Hofy’s Remote IT Service Desk?

• One-stop solution for IT provisioning and management - Integrate with our pre-configuration and mobile device management (MDM) offering to save money on your overall IT support package.
• Global, 24/7/365 coverage - So your IT support is not compromised by time zones, national holidays etc.
• Guaranteed response and completion times - Guaranteed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Time saving - Your team member does not need to waste time trying to diagnose and resolve issues themselves. Your internal team does not get sidetracked from the tasks they were actually hired to do because they are resolving IT issues. Win win.
• Cost-effective - No need to hire an IT team dedicated to technical support, or stretch your internal resources to tasks outside of their job spec.
• Better employee experience - Team members do not need to waste time trying to self-diagnose issues, and can book a live support session at a time that best suits them.