Scaling an IT services business can be difficult for anyone to manage. When is the right time to hire someone new to help? How much more can you handle before the workload becomes overwhelming? Those are tough choices, especially for small business owners, when one new employee could push your payroll costs over the edge.
In a surprising move, Comodo is offering free help desk support services for MSPs for an entire year. Utilizing Comodo's 24/7 Help Desk can help MSPs eliminate the need to hire additional employees and allows the MSP to scale quickly, manage more efficiently and grow its business, the company claims. Comodo would take over the troubleshooting, setup, tune up and maintenance so the MSP can focus on higher level projects.
Comodo claims that their technicians are regularly trained and monitored for quality to keep performance and efficiency optimal. The technicians are also certified and trained to handle most Level 1 and 2 support requests.
Comodo's Outsourced Help Desk Services for MSPs
Some of the requests Comodo's Help Desk team can handle are:
- Virus & malware removal
- Desktop performance optimization
- PC and peripheral tune up/troubleshoot
- Printer and peripheral setup/troubleshoot
- User administration
- ISP problems troubleshoot
- Email and browser setup/troubleshoot
- Application setup/troubleshoot (e.g. MS Office, client application)
- Shared drive setup
- Software installation/uninstallation/updates
- Assistance with backup (local & cloud) and recovery
- Escalate any further predefined issues (like hardware) to your teams based on your rules
If your company is already considering outsourcing parts of your business tasks, this seems like a potential way to try it out without getting locked into an expensive contract.
Offering this kind of service for an entire year for free doesn't seem like a great business model for Comodo -- but I can see some potential benefits.
First, the company could generate revenue by getting your company to transfer your IT ticketing to Comodo's Service Desk platform, which I'm sure is what they use to handle your company's tickets. The other benefit could be that after you have used the service for so long, you would be reluctant to go back to the way you were doing business before, and then they have won your business over other providers.
In a forum, the company admitted that they are not really looking to this as a major profit center. So, they really could just be looking for better brand recognition or to market their other products and services through the free Help Desk.
There are still some unanswered questions, such as where will the free Help Desk be based, and how much will it cost at the end of the free year. Whatever the company's current motivation is, we're curious to see if MSPs give it a look.
MSP-focused Help Desks
No doubt, MSPs have multiple outsourced help desks from which to choose. Well-known options include:
- Collabrance (a GreatAmerica company);
- Continuum (which is also beta testing a security operations center for MSPs);
- GMS Live Expert;
- Inbay;
- IT By Design (which works closely with ConnectWise);
- Kaseya NOC Services;
- Live Virtual Help Desk; and
- NetEnrich.
- (Whom did we miss? Email me: [email protected])
And of course, each of those companies serves different market segments so be sure to align your specific needs with the most appropriate third-party services.
Additional reporting and insights from Joe Panettieri.
