SmileNet Managed Technical Support vs. In-House Technicians – Which Makes More Sense for a Growing Business?

For a small or mid-sized business owner planning on growth, hiring in-house technicians usually seems like a good idea. At first.

While relying on the attention and expertise of an in-house IT technician or a team of technicians can offer peace of mind, it also comes with additional costs. According to the United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary of a single computer user support specialist is about $50,000 per year.

Employers also have to account for taxes paid on employee salaries, healthcare benefits, and other legal requirements that come with the decision to hire. This is no problem for large enterprises, but businesses positioning themselves for growth can find these obstacles to be substantial ones.

This is where managed technical support services can provide scalable, growth-friendly results at a fraction of the price. But is outsourced quality of service the same as that provided by an in-house hire? Do managed technical support providers have an incentive to offer top-shelf IT solutions to their clients?

There is a good chance that your business may find IT sourced services to be valuable assets for growth. Find out if managed IT service is the option for you.

When to Hire In-House IT Technicians

Hiring your own in-house team can pay off as a long-term strategy if you are certain about your organization’s capacity for growth. If you are well-established in your market and your team is reliably set in place for years to come, then keeping technical expertise inside your organization gives you total control over the quality of the work performed.

Essentially, you need to have a business plan that mitigates the following three risks in order to make this tactic preferable to contracting managed IT services:

• Workload. If you know that you have enough work on your plate to provide for an open-ended hiring agreement for one or more IT technicians, then the question is one of value. Does the value of a new hire compensate for the cost?
• Turnover. The tech industry has the highest turnover rate in the entire job market. People with technology skills are in high demand. You need to have strategies in place for employee retention if you are going to hire IT technicians – even entry-level ones.
• Management. When it comes to technical support, managed service providers have an entire hierarchy of expertise at your disposal. It’s not as simple as hiring an “IT guy.” Someone has to account for that employee’s workload, which means you must either delegate to a manager or take on the responsibility yourself.

Why Choose Managed Technical Support

A managed vendor operates much in the same way as a hired employee. You sign a contract with the service provider for operating, maintaining, and troubleshooting your IT infrastructure. When your employees or customers have problems, they contact your outsourced IT partner for resolution.

There are many benefits of hiring an external company for this job. Advantages include the structure of managed service providers to the more diverse skill set they bring to the table.

• Structural Efficiency. Your managed service provider may not be your own dedicated IT team, but it leverages the combined experience and expertise of multiple teams. Every single process that goes into a managed solution has been tried, retried, tested, debugged, and refined multiple times over.
• State-of-the-Art Tools. One of the larger expenses associated with running your own support department is purchasing equipment and software licenses. Managed service providers leverage economies of scale to purchase and use the best equipment money can buy.
• Cost-Effectiveness. Not having to make an initial capital investment in your IT support team’s equipment needs is great. Not having to invest in additional salaries, training, benefits, and potential wasted man-hours when your network is working perfectly fine is even better.
• Skills. Regardless of how large a salary you can offer, how attractive your company is to work for, and how good your recruiters are, there are bound to be skill gaps in your in-house IT team. Network infrastructure is a complex and rapidly moving field that constantly places new demands on its professionals, from learning new programming languages to dealing with the latest cybersecurity threats.

Make SmileNet Your Managed Technical Support Solution

Smile offers managed technical support solutions designed for scalability and efficiency. With our team fielding your tech support needs, you can focus on what your company does best – your core processes – and leave the infrastructure up to us.

Ready to talk to a Smile specialist about technical support? We’re always happy to fill new clients in on the benefits of our services.