Services
IT help desk and service desk
A service desk that answers, and a second line behind it that can actually fix the thing — so the ticket stops being passed around.
- Indicative rate
- $20–52 / hour
- Shortlist
- 3 CVs in 48 hours
- Overlap
- 4–8 hours daily, contracted
- We accept
- 1 engineer in 12
How it works
What outsourced IT help desk services cover
Most help desks are judged on the wrong number. Average handle time and first-response SLA can look healthy while the people raising tickets are quietly furious, because the measure that decides how a user feels is how many times their ticket changed hands. HappySignals' full-year 2023 benchmark puts a reassignment at more than seven points of end-user satisfaction and one hour forty-six minutes of that person's working time. At four reassignments they have lost most of a working day.
That is the honest argument against buying a cheap offshore first line, and we are an offshore provider making it. A desk that can only reset passwords and re-image laptops has to hand off everything else, and when the second line sits in another company or another timezone, the handoff is where the day goes. We staff L1 and L2/L3 in the same team on the same shift pattern, so most escalations are a tap on the shoulder rather than a reassignment and a wait.
We work in your tooling rather than ours — your Zendesk, Freshdesk, ServiceNow or Jira — so the ticket history and the reporting stay yours and you can look at the queue without asking us for a deck. Cover runs round the clock on a follow-the-sun rota rather than a pager: the 3pm Tuesday P1 in New York lands on a shift that is already awake. Rates are published by seniority on our site, and the agents are named people you interview before they start.
Choosing the right model
When another model fits better
Do not buy this if the work is desk-side. Hardware swaps, cabling and anything where someone has to physically stand next to the user need local hands, and we will tell you to contract those locally rather than pretend otherwise. Skip it too if your users are required to reach someone in their own country for regulatory or contractual reasons — that is a real constraint and no amount of shift planning answers it.
Every engagement model here is priced on the rates page, so you can compare the options rather than take our word for which one fits.
Rates
Rate bands by experience and market
| Experience | United States | United Kingdom | Australia | United Arab Emirates | Canada |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| build2–4 years | $20–28/hour$3,200–4,480/month | £150–210/day£3,000–4,200/month | A$28–38/hourA$4,480–6,080/month | AED 95–135/hourAED 15,200–21,600/month | C$30–40/hourC$4,800–6,400/month |
| senior5–8 years | $28–38/hour$4,480–6,080/month | £210–300/day£4,200–6,000/month | A$38–52/hourA$6,080–8,320/month | AED 135–185/hourAED 21,600–29,600/month | C$40–54/hourC$6,400–8,640/month |
| lead9+ years, or tech lead | $38–52/hour$6,080–8,320/month | £300–450/day£6,000–9,000/month | A$52–70/hourA$8,320–11,200/month | AED 185–250/hourAED 29,600–40,000/month | C$54–72/hourC$8,640–11,520/month |
All-inclusive and indicative, shown so you can compare us against a local hire. Monthly figures assume 160 hours a month and the same for the day-rate markets, so the two always reconcile. Engagements are contracted as a monthly capacity fee or a fixed-scope deliverable, with our own delivery lead accountable for the outcome — see engagement models. There is no setup fee, no recruitment fee and no management surcharge.
Questions
IT help desk and service desk: questions buyers ask
- Our users are in the US. Will they notice the desk is in India?
- Yes, and you should settle whether that matters before you shortlist anyone. Our argument is that what users react to is being passed around and left waiting rather than where the voice is from, and the benchmark data puts a number on that. But if your users have told you plainly that they want an onshore desk, believe them and buy one — you will not win that argument with a cost model.
- Is this a named person or a ticket queue?
- A queue, honestly. A service desk is shift-based because it has to answer at 3am and one person cannot. What is named is the team — the same small group month after month, who learn your estate, rather than whoever a pool assigns that day. If you want a single named individual owning the work, that is system administration, not a help desk.
- Whose ticketing system do you work in?
- Yours. Named accounts in your directory, scoped and logged, inside your Zendesk, Freshdesk, ServiceNow or Jira Service Management. We do not migrate your tickets into a system of ours, because then your history and your reporting belong to us and leaving gets expensive.
- What happens if an agent is not working out?
- We replace them at our cost, at any point in the engagement rather than only inside a trial window. Tell us and the shortlist starts that week.
- Can you cover our public holidays?
- Yes, and this is where an offshore desk is genuinely better rather than merely cheaper. Indian public holidays do not overlap with American or British ones, so Thanksgiving, Christmas and the August bank holiday are ordinary working days for the shift covering them.
Other ways to work with us
System administration and server management
Someone whose job is that the servers are patched, backed up, monitored and boring.
Hand over a function — maintenance, QA, cloud operations, support — with the service level written down.
DevOps and platform engineering
Pipelines, clusters, infrastructure as code and the telemetry that turns an outage into a five-minute diagnosis.
Send us one role brief
One page is enough: the stack, the seniority, the first month of work and the hours you need covered. Three shortlisted CVs come back within 48 hours, with the rate band and notice period attached.