The technical support outsourcing market is expected to reach a compound annual growth rate of nearly 8 percent by 2022. Many businesses outsource technical support, since for them it’s a fitting, cost-effective solution to improve their efficiency.
These days, it’s critical for organizations of any size to enable advanced business continuity management and ensure comprehensive disaster recovery plans are in place. Having an experienced offshore team flawlessly managing technical issues and incidents is especially relevant during periods of systems change or when there’s a need to enable continuous remote work for your teams.
So, what are the different support levels available, and how can you be sure which level will best suit your needs best? Here’s what you need to know.
L1 support – This level provides support and resolution for basic customer issues and service desk requests that require the involvement of low-level technical specialists. L1 support personnel are trained to assist with known issues and typical user requests following predefined scripts and scenarios. If no solution is available, the support specialist will escalate an incident to L2 support.
L2 support – Following a failure, this level of support can get you back on your feet quickly without making any changes to your source code. L2 support covers applications, databases, integration points, related environment components, virtual cloud infrastructure, etc. This level of support requires deep knowledge of the product or service. Still, support experts at this level are not necessarily the engineers who designed and developed the product.
L3 support – In case the incident is too complex to be solved by L2 support, it gets escalated to L3 support, which offers fundamental support for significant issues. L3 support covers amending software by changing program code. L3 experts are skilled not only in solving advanced software issues but also in introducing improvements to program code. L3 support provides bug fixing and system compliance checks. It also covers security and performance issues and enables updates to integration interfaces.
When you outsource your IT support function to a trusted vendor, your in-house team can stay focused on your core business while a team of offshore experts take care of your IT infrastructure. Here are some of the benefits of outsourcing your technical support.
Along with the many benefits of outsourcing technical support there are some pitfalls you should keep in mind. The most common of these is failing to establish proper internal quality control. Our advice is to make sure there is a single person within your business performing the role of product or service owner. This person will not only be responsible for the product development but will also take over support vendor management, acting as a single point of contact for your outsourcing partner. Having a product owner in-house will help you maintain control over service quality. This person can also ensure that core knowledge remains within your walls, so you can avoid vendor lock-in.
It is essential to make sure you're working with the right partner. At ELEKS, we ensure permanent service quality assurance, ongoing service delivery coordination and reporting, and strict adherence to project SLAs. Our clients are the world's leading enterprises and SMBs from the USA, the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
We provide the best of the best experts in each field – our team is equipped with expert knowledge across multiple technological specialisms combined with strong analytical skills and understanding of the business domain. Almost 30 years of experience working with multicultural brands allow us to eliminate the cultural gap and communicate with excellent efficiency.
If you'd like to learn more about how outsourcing IT support with ELEKS can help you, contact us today.
The breadth of knowledge and understanding that ELEKS has within its walls allows us to leverage that expertise to make superior deliverables for our customers. When you work with ELEKS, you are working with the top 1% of the aptitude and engineering excellence of the whole country.
Right from the start, we really liked ELEKS’ commitment and engagement. They came to us with their best people to try to understand our context, our business idea, and developed the first prototype with us. They were very professional and very customer oriented. I think, without ELEKS it probably would not have been possible to have such a successful product in such a short period of time.
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