IT Help Desk Outsourcing

Your colleagues are a different kind of user

An IT help desk supports employees, not customers, and that changes almost everything about how it should run.

Internal users cannot take their business elsewhere, so satisfaction is not the pressure that keeps standards up - productivity is. Every minute an employee cannot work costs you directly. They also have context a customer never has: they know your systems, they will tell you what they already tried, and they will escalate through the org chart rather than through your ticket process if you are slow.

RHI provides dedicated IT help desk teams supporting your employees, working in your service management platform to your processes.

Requests and incidents are not the same queue

This is the single most useful distinction in help desk design, and conflating the two is why many internal desks feel slow.

A request is someone asking for something they are entitled to: new starter access, a software licence, a password reset, a piece of equipment, a permission change. It is predictable, it should be largely proceduralised, and it is usually approval-bound rather than skill-bound. Speed comes from removing waiting, not from cleverness.

An incident is something broken: an application failing, a device not working, connectivity down. It needs diagnosis, and it needs prioritisation by business impact rather than by who asked loudest.

We split the queues, staff them with the right balance of skills, and report them separately - because a blended figure lets a fast request queue hide a slow incident queue, or the reverse.

What the team handles

• Service requests - access, licences, permissions, software installation, equipment.
• Incident triage and first-line resolution - application faults, device issues, connectivity, printing, peripherals.
• Password resets and account lockouts - usually the single highest-volume contact type.
• Onboarding and offboarding IT tasks - provisioning for new starters, and revoking access for leavers.
• Software and device guidance - the how-do-I questions that otherwise interrupt colleagues.
• Escalation to your infrastructure or application teams - with the diagnosis attached.
• Asset and licence record maintenance - keeping the inventory true, which decays fast if nobody owns it.

Prioritisation by impact, not by volume of voice

Internal desks are uniquely vulnerable to priority inflation, because users can apply organisational pressure directly. Without a defined matrix, the loudest requester wins and genuinely urgent work waits.

We agree a priority matrix built from business impact and urgency - how many people are affected, whether a business process is stopped, and whether a workaround exists - and we apply it consistently. Where you want named roles handled with a higher default priority, that is a legitimate business decision; we would rather it was written into the matrix openly than applied informally.

Offboarding is a security control

Worth calling out because it is routinely treated as administration and it is not.

Access that outlives employment is one of the most common serious findings in any security review. We treat leaver processing as time-bound work with a defined completion check rather than a ticket in a queue, and we report completion rather than assuming it. If your current process depends on someone remembering to raise a ticket, that is worth fixing before anything else on this page.

Coverage and the follow-the-sun option

Internal desks need cover that matches when your people work, which for a distributed organisation is wider than any single office day.

Coverage is built from shift units, and India delivery aligns usefully here: an India shift covers the European morning and the Asia-Pacific afternoon, and an India night shift covers North American hours. Where you need genuine continuous cover, see 24/7 support; where you need to extend an existing internal team rather than replace it, see after-hours and overflow support.

Systems and access

Agents work in your service management platform - the ticket record has to live where your infrastructure and application teams already work, or escalation becomes copying. Our teams are experienced across common service desk and ticketing platforms, and across Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace administration.

Help desk work requires elevated access, so this is where access control matters most. Access is least-privilege and role-based, granted per named individual, and revoked as part of our own leaver process. Where you require restricted environments or session recording for privileged actions, that is configured during scoping. See security and data protection.

What we do not do

We are not a managed cybersecurity provider. We handle help desk operations and can follow your security procedures - including access reviews and incident escalation - but we do not provide security monitoring, threat detection or incident response as a security service.

We also do not make infrastructure or architecture decisions. We operate the desk; your IT function owns the estate.

Quality and reporting

Reported separately for requests and incidents: first contact resolution, time to resolve by priority, reopen rate, backlog age, escalation rate with reasons, and satisfaction. Plus two that matter specifically to internal desks - leaver access revocation completed within target, and asset record accuracy.

Interactions are sampled and scored against an agreed scorecard, with verification and access-change criteria scored pass-or-fail. See quality assurance. Figures published elsewhere on this site are historical or representative and campaign-dependent.

Getting started, and what it costs

Priced per dedicated agent per month with a five-agent minimum - published rates and what moves them.

Bring ticket volume split by request and incident if you can, your top ten contact reasons, and your current leaver-processing time. Related: technical support outsourcing, tiered support. Talk to us.