Episode 59: 10 Questions to Ask an Outsourced Helpdesk for MSPs

Welcome to the Infinite Scale podcast. My name is James Vickery. Really excited to have you along for a special show today. And it's special because we've got a guest.

Hello, Rosie. Hello. So Rosie is our head of customer success at Benchmark 365. And I thought maybe you could tell us what this show will be about today, Rosie?

Yeah, so we've been having a lot of strategy calls just in this last year and for many, many years. And I thought we could talk about the 10 most common questions that an MSP asks and should be asking. That's great. I think I was adding it up today and we've met with over 2,000 managed service providers over the past eight years since we started benchmark in 2016 this episode's been recorded in 2024 and so it's amazing how some things change and some stay the same and we get a lot of very similar questions and so I think it's a really great initiative that we cover those off and maybe give people an opportunity to think about those before diving into a call with an outsourced help desk provider yeah why don't we start with what are what are those questions why don't we just start by listing those out Yeah, so the first question we get is like, how does our team access the partners tools?

And how do we do that securely? Another really good question is how does the workflow work in terms of integration, email and calls? Another really good one is do we get our own pod? Will we see the same people every day?

Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. Another one related to that is where is the team? Where are they located?

Right. That's a common one. We also get like what kind of technologies do we support and which ones are excluded? Another really common one in terms of like contract and pricing is do we have a minimum contract or a minimum term of conditions?

Another one related to that one is, is there a minimum price point or how much should I be spending as an MSP of my size? Very, very common. I love this question because I'm into onboarding is how does onboarding work? I think a really good one, sometimes partners forget to ask, but we also do get it quite often is what do we look for in a partner?

So how can you guys set yourself up to be a good partner? I love that one. That is a good question. Yes.

And the last one is, should I onboard everybody or like a select group of customers? Very good. Is that all 10? That is all 10.

Wow. Well, that's a lot to cover. So how about we just get into it and see, um, see what we can come up with. Sounds good.

on the first one that I mentioned. How does Benchmark access our partner's tools? So that's a really good question. Benchmark will work with your tools, whether it's your RMM tool or your Screen Connect tool or any other product that you use to support your customer, we will access that.

The only product we won't access directly is your PSA and that's because we integrate with your PSA. So for all of those other tools, generally you will assign us one account. You might call that account technician, you know, is a good example. You might not call it benchmark 365 because if it's something that shows up on the other end for your customer, they might then say, well, who is that?

And that opens up a whole other can of worms. But generally you might just just pick something generic and we will monitor that account so that we know who is accessing that account and when they're accessing. So this could be something like ITGlue or it could be, again, one of your screen connect or remote monitoring and management tools. Thank you.

I think that's a great answer. And it is good to remember not to make a benchmark help desk. A lot of people do that and then it shows benchmark on the RMM when we connect. Right.

And I want to say it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it all comes down to managing client expectations. So lots of our partners will say, we work with Benchmark 365. There's certainly no issue with that, but a lot don't. And also when we do communicate things like that, it doesn't mean if you've got, you know, a hundred or a thousand users you're managing, not everyone will know who Benchmark is.

And so it's better to just use something that's more, that identifies you as opposed to identifying us. Yeah, a lot of times help desk is probably the best way to go. Great, good one. What's the next one?

Question number two, very common question is how does the workflow work, especially in terms of integration? Great question and a really nuanced question because it often comes down to what it is that you want to achieve with the outsourced Health Desk. Obviously, if we're managing absolutely everything for an MSP, then it makes sense that we manage the support mailbox, in which case we process the ticket and we have a product that we use called Smart Desk. And all of our people are domiciled inside Smart Desk.

And that way we can manage our people, we manage our queues, and we manage our turnaround times, and the quality of service that we provide. So that would be like the perfect world is that we just manage the support mailbox. And when we completed the ticket, we can integrate it into your platform. And we integrate with products such as ConnectWise Manage, Autotask, Halo, Synchro, Repair Shopper, Atera.

I'm thinking of this, there's just so many platforms that we integrate with, but they're the main ones. Kaseya BMS is another one. And so in a perfect world, we work the ticket and position it back to you. If you don't have a PSA solution, You can just simply work from Smart Desk, which we provide for free to all of our partners.

Or it might be a hybrid of those options as well, where we're doing some things, we're managing some of the tickets ourselves, you're managing some of them, and then we bring everything back together through integration. Lastly we also have an open API that you can utilize but it really just depends on the sizing of your engagement And so what we often say to an MSP is step one is let just figure out how we going to work together to pilot benchmark services and see if they're right for you.

You'll want to evaluate the quality of service. You'll want to evaluate our turnaround times. You'll want to evaluate a whole bunch of things that have very little to do with the business systems themselves. And then from there, the sky's the limit in terms of how we integrate and interface with one another.

Yeah, that's a really good point. Nice. The next one, probably the most common question we get, and I think it's because humans in general love connection, is do we get our own pod? Will we see the same people every day?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that that is a great question and something I've got a two-part answer. The first part is one of the challenges that MSPs have is staff turnover. And one of the issues that MSPs run into is this affinity that the customer develops with a help desk technician.

And they say, I always want, I'll just make up names. I always want Christine to work my tickets. Or I always want Sam to work my tickets. And that kind of feels good until Christine's away on holidays and Sam leaves for another opportunity.

So one of the most common reasons that an MSP looks to outsource is due to the churn that they're experiencing in their own business. And they want to make sure that there's always consistency. So the consistency from Benchmark comes in the fact that we're constantly hiring, training and developing people so that there is never a gap on the help desk, that the help desk is being delivered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But we do get it, and we do know that you want to develop some rapport with people.

So each benchmark partner is assigned a pod, and the size of that pod largely depends on the size of your engagement with Benchmark. It's usually a minimum of three people, but it could be as many as 10, maybe even 15 people. And what we'll do is we'll assign them generally to your account, And so you will get used to dealing with the same people. However, we do reserve the right to change those people if it's not working out for one reason or another.

Perhaps at our end, we don't feel that the quality is there and we might need to appoint somebody else to the pod. Or we might see that someone works really well with you and doesn't work so well elsewhere. And so our job as HR specialists is to make sure that we're always aligning people with you. And most importantly, if someone slips on a banana peel, hits their head, can't come to work today, all the kind of weird and obscure things that happen when you manage people, we'll take care of that and we'll make sure that somebody else is supplanted into the pod to support your business so that you can focus on growth and focus on selling.

Yeah, that's a really good answer. Next question, closely related, is where is the team? That is a really good question. We get this a lot.

So I'll tell a little bit of a backstory. Our company started in Australia. If you can't tell by my accent, I'm from Sydney, Australia. And so the company started here.

We started as an MSP and we've got a good size team here in Australia, which is more oriented towards professional services and project work that we conduct for MSPs. Our core group of level one, level two and level three personnel are primarily based in two locations in the Philippines. In Cebu, where our HQ is, you might need to look that up if you haven't heard of it before, but it's spelled C-E-B-U. And that's where the HQ is.

That's where we started our outsourcing journey as a company. We then have another location in Manila. Manila is the largest city in the Philippines. And then we have another location in Durban in South Africa.

You might want to google that one too if you haven't looked at the map of South Africa before, that we have a crew there. And then we have some people that are based in other parts of the world. All through COVID, we've ended up hiring people that maybe have said, hey, I prefer to live back where I came from. Maybe they're in a remote part of Australia or somewhere else around the world.

But those are people that we've worked with and know and trust have worked with us for a really long time. Lastly, often we get questions about the Philippines and the interesting thing is, for example, Rosie, you're based in the Philippines, but you're from the United States. And that's a really common thing as well is that we've got a lot of people from different backgrounds, different countries that are actually working in our Philippines office, but are not originally from the Philippines as well.

Yep, it's very true. Thank you. So the next question is more around like technology. So a common one is what do we support and are there any exclusions?

Yeah, that is probably one of the more common ones we get, particularly the techiness comes out and says, you know, do you support, you know, Hyper-V or do you support VMware or do you support Cisco? And the really short answer is yes. we absolutely support everything that any you would expect any of your employees to handle or that you would expect to handle yourself so there's no scope limitation there's no like well we've we don't do that we're not sending tickets back because we haven't seen it before it comes down to what's required to deliver that service and the more that we can manage one another's expectations rather than throwing us into the deep end.

If you've got a product that you support regularly, let's say for the sake of argument, it's a VoIP system that you support regularly. Maybe we've seen it before. Maybe we've worked with it a little bit, but maybe you've got very specific instructions for how we should work with that. Maybe you've got setup instructions, for example, that are unique to a specific client.

That's where onboarding is so critical. When we're onboarding, you'll tell us about that. You'll say, hey, I've got a customer, they've got 50 seats, and they're using this particular technology. We want to take you through it.

And what we'll do there is we'll have our subject matter experts learn from you, ingest your documentation, maybe even take some videos, and then share it with the broader pod so that they know how to support that item as well. So the short answer is yes everything supported There no such thing as not supported but it comes down to managing how we support that If something going to you can solve it in 15 minutes but it's going to take us three hours. How do we get to where you are?

What do we need to do together to get to that point? Yeah, very true. Next question is about pricing. So very common that we get this question, is there a minimum price or even better question, how much should I be spending?

That is a really good question and I think that it depends and so it's one of those things that I might ask an MSP, well if we didn't exist what would you be hiring? You know, would you be thinking about hiring a level two resource? Would you be thinking about hiring a level three? If you're looking to do 24-7, are you thinking about hiring six or seven people to meet that demand.

And so I like to start by saying, well, what are we trying to solve? What sort of volume of work are we trying to address? And then from there, what we find is that we typically come in at about 50% of the cost of a direct FTE comparison. So let's say you wanted to hire a $100,000 a year level three resource.

I'm just throwing numbers out there. I don't know, maybe in your market, it's less, maybe it's more. Generally speaking, we know what the output level of that person is and benchmark will be about half the cost. So what should you be spending?

You should be spending about half as much as you would hiring your own person. That's the first thing. The second thing is we've built this to scale up or down to suit your needs. So if you've only got a very low budget and you need somewhere to start, maybe you just need after hours support for example, then our packages start at $990 a month.

If you're looking for unlimited support for thousands of endpoints, we need to talk to you about that and figure out what the appropriate spend level is for you. But I can assure you that it will always come in at about half of local hiring. The average MSP will spend somewhere between $3,000 to $8,000 per month on outsourced help desk support. And how did that number come about?

Well, the average MSP is generally a small business, generally not a large enterprise company, and are looking to maybe subsidize hiring one or two people. And so that's where benchmark typically lands in terms of investment. That makes sense. Thank you, James.

Let's go to the next one. Is there a minimum contract term? So I think this one is very, very common because a lot of our competitors are quite different than we are. Right.

Yeah. And I think like we've gotten so accustomed in this industry to getting a provider saying, hey, we need to sign you up for a year or two years, or I think I've even seen like three-year contracts amongst vendors. Benchmark's, I'm going to make this really easy. We're a monthly subscription service, which means that you can sign up with Benchmark.

We have a one-time onboarding fee, which is usually $990 as well. One-time onboarding fee, and then it's a 30-day minimum contract, and you can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel the service with one month's notice. All we need is written notice to make any changes to the program at all. Most MSPs will look to do at least 90 days with us because what we've learned is that it takes about 90 days to demonstrate the capability of our firm and to see if this is a really good fit.

But you have the option at any point in time to upgrade, downgrade or cancel with 30 days written notice. Nice. All right, we're almost done. We only have three more questions left.

Next one is how does onboarding work? Yeah, so onboarding, I feel like you should be answering this one. I'll give a high level, but if you want to answer any more, please go ahead. But onboarding is nice and easy.

We know that most MSPs contact us because they're ready to go. Something's happened. Maybe there's a business opportunity that needs to be addressed. Maybe an employee has resigned.

Maybe there's been an unexpected surge in demand. but most MSPs will be talking to us because they're ready to go. And we get that. So we have a 15-day onboarding period.

And in that 15 days, we are moving rapidly to get to know everything there is to know about the body of work that we're going to be delivering. Maybe we're going to be supporting a small group of customers. We want to know as much as we can possibly learn about those customers. We'll be signing into your tools to make sure that we can access and there are no limitations in terms of accessing what we need to to get the job done.

We'll be setting things up like security to FA, making sure that there's security around the aspects of your IT and your customer IT that we're accessing. And then there's some training that we'll be undertaking with you to help adopt this service and make this service embedded in your business successfully as well. I think I covered most of it, but is there anything that I missed, Rosie? No, that was well said.

Great. And I think the thing is to make this as turnkey as possible. So 15-day onboarding, monthly subscription should be a no-brainer because we know that there's so many moving parts in an MSP. We don't want you bogged down for months and months and months thinking about how you're going to do this.

The idea is that by the time you're booking in a call with Benchmark, you're pretty much ready to go. We're just crossing the T's, dotting the I's, and ready to turn the ignition and get moving. Very good. I agree.

All right, next question. What do we benchmark look for in a partner? That's a really good question. A really, really good question.

So we've talked a bit about first of all readiness. So if you're inquiring with benchmark and you're just sort of thinking about it and you might not be ready for six months or 12 months, it's better to have that chat later because this is such a dynamic space. And although there might be value in kind of having a chat and getting a bit of an idea, which we're happy to do, you don't want to get into a big deep dive until you've got a really good sense that you're ready to go.

That's what this content is about today. Making sure that most of what we'll talk about on a strategy call with you is what we're covering in this podcast today. Next, what we're looking for is how well we're going to gel together. one of the biggest challenges is going to be getting to know you and opening up the lines of communication Because effectively not only are we operating on I guess metaphorical islands but we operating on physical ones as well And so we need to set up lines of communication.

Go on to the days where we can just lean over to the person next to us and say, hey, can you have a look at this ticket or this issue? We have to set up lines of communication and make sure we're meeting with you regularly. most of our partners will meet with us once a week for a service delivery call most of our partners are available via chat of which we'll set up a chat channel with you to chat with you most of our partners are ready to jump in and chat with us whenever there's something that we need to work out in the partnership in fact even in our contract we've got some mandatory communication set in place and one is to attend those regular meetings two is to get back to one another within 24 hours about something that may affect the value of the partnership in some way, may affect the way that we do business together.

And I've found that our ultra super partners, the ones that are really successful with Benchmark, the ones that are growing consistently with Benchmark, one is they pick up the phone. So if they want to talk to a tech, they pick up the phone, they talk to the tech, they figure stuff out together as if it's their own technician. Two, they'll send out something to the team. Maybe they'll send out some shirts or some hats.

Maybe they'll send a pizza, you know, something like that. It's not about, you know, with pizza, we'll buy the pizza. That's fine. But it's the sentiment of caring enough about this team that sometimes these teams are working for you at two in the morning, three in the morning, four o'clock on a Sunday.

So it's about respecting them and saying, hey, I care about you and I want to send you a slice of pizza to say, you know, thanks for what you're doing. And then the ones that are really killing it, they're actually on a plane, they're coming to the Philippines, they're hanging out with the team, we have an annual event, and those partners are growing 100% year on year, because they understand the value of a team underpinning their sales growth. Lastly, I know there's a lot covered there, we work really well with MSPs that want to grow.

There's lots of MSPs that aren't growing. The only difference between a fast growth MSP and one that isn't growing is sales. And our partners understand that Benchmark's doing the delivery where your delivery partner. So we're delivering ticket, ticket, ticket, ticket, ticket.

We're getting that stuff out of your way. And that should free you up to go and knock on door number one, door number two, door number three. So the MSPs that work really well with us bed down the service desk. So spend about three or four months making sure the service desk is running effectively.

And then they change roles, they pivot and they start focusing on sales. Those are awesome partners for us because they want to grow. And that's what we're here to do. Yeah, definitely.

All right, we only have one question left. Should I onboard all of my customers? Going back to the last question, of course, Eventually, yeah, that would be valuable because if you think about what we do as an organization, we're eliminating the HR headache. The hardest thing in business, the hardest thing is organized labor.

And Benchmark's done it. We've got a team of ready-to-go MSP professionals ready to support your customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So like we've eliminated that headache of hiring people, the headache of finding that right person, you know, the headache of onboarding them, which is an average scale up time of six months to get someone to cadence, to get someone working at the same level as a tenured member of your team. And then the headache of them maybe not performing or them leaving.

And so benchmarks eliminated that. If you think about the partnership, benchmarks, the HR engine, making sure there's staff ready to deliver 24 hours a day and you are the sales engine ready to go out there and win new business. So naturally, the more that we can take on your customers, the better things will go, but not from day one. And this is what we've learned as a business.

These are our key learnings is that whilst we can deliver 100 customers and 1,000 tickets on day one, there's a lot more to it than that. You need the time to work through this with your team and your customers. And so generally what we recommend is to work in batches of five or 10 customers at a time. Maybe we spend a couple of months with that group of customers, then we take on another group, then we take on another group and eventually if you're comfortable and is this if this is your strategy we can actually manage the whole lot and that's a really exciting concept because if you're reducing your cost by 50 percent and you never have to worry about hr again man what a utopia that's really cool but probably not from day one and that's been a big lesson for us we used to think that was the way to go today we're a little more reserved we're a little more walk before you run.

And I think that's been really successful for our current and modern partners that we work with. Definitely. All right. Thank you.

Those were all of our questions. Where do you want to go from here, James? Well, I think that's a lot to cover. So thank you for sharing those questions.

And hopefully that was helpful to those of you that are listening today. If you'd like to know more about Benchmark 365, please reach out. You can email us at hello at benchmark365.com or you can visit our website we have a chat on the website where you can actually just chat ask any questions you like hopefully we've covered a lot of those today but if there's more you need to know you can chat and then you can book in a strategy call we strongly encourage just thinking about all of these questions that are covered today because often what we find is we cover these in the strategy call that there's probably a lot more to think about that's a little more specific to your company and your needs.

So have a, if you need to, have another listen through these, book in a strategy call. We'd love to talk to you and we'd love to learn more about your MSP as well. So I think that's all for today. Thank you, Rosie.

You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Always good to see you and look forward to speaking to those of you that are out there in the audience today. Hope to speak with you soon.

Talk soon. Bye bye. Thank you.