Outsourcing Retail IT Support: A Guide to Success  

In brief: 

• Retailers top the list of industries with the most tech outages: nearly 40% report outages at least once per week. 
• Providing effective retail IT support can be challenging due to several industry-specific factors such as the increasing complexity of in-store technology, the use of diverse hardware and platforms at different stores, retail organizations being a prime target for cyberattacks, etc. 
• The right strategy for successful retail IT support includes having an end goal in mind, clearly defining service desk scope and expectations, leveraging AI and automation, creating a location strategy that supports your store footprint, and more.  

Retail stands as one of the most tech-reliant industries today. Amid intense competition, shifting customer demands, economic pressures, and supply chain disruptions, technology has emerged as a saving grace for retailers striving to protect already-narrow margins. 

Unfortunately, retail also tops the list of industries facing the most tech outages: nearly 40% of retailers report outages at least once per week, New Relic’s 2023 State of Observability report found. Outages are also 25% more expensive for retailers than other businesses, coming in at an average annual cost of $9.95 million, compared to $7.75 million across all industries. 

In today’s hyperconnected world, the true effects of downtime stretch beyond a single store and temporary loss of sales. A whopping 63% of consumers are likely to abandon a brand they once felt loyal to after a single bad experience, a significant rise from 42% in 2021, TCN’s 2024 Consumer Insights survey found.  

Supporting critical store technology with a high-performing help desk can provide seamless, multi-channel assistance with wide coverage, proactive maintenance, and the ability to quickly scale and adapt to changing requirements. The goal: rapid problem resolution across stores to help retailers maintain operational continuity and customer satisfaction. 

In this blog, we explore the biggest challenges to effective retail IT support – and the roadmap to success. To access our full step-by-step guide to retail service desk success, download “Retail Help Desk Outsourcing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effective IT Support” now!  

Why is effective retail IT support so challenging? 

Retail IT support must resolve high-priority issues in real time to avoid disruptions during peak service hours. But the unique needs of the retail industry make effective technical support challenging: 

• The growing amount and complexity of store technology, particularly with the integration of emerging technologies like AI into retail operations, makes it both costly and challenging for retailers to manage hundreds or even thousands of store locations with in-house IT support.
• Stores belonging to different brands operated by a single retailer – or even stores belonging to the same brand – often use different technology tools and platforms. Tech support can be complicated when stores have different hardware running the same POS software, or even just different software versions. This challenges retailers on many levels, making it difficult to standardize support, troubleshoot processes, and centralize tracking and reporting of sales, inventory, and customer behavior across brands. 
• The multi-location nature of retail generally means dealing with different time zones, operational hours, and callers with varying levels of tech proficiency, ranging from high school student employees to store managers to corporate staff.
• The retail sector is a prime target for cyberthreats, accounting for 10.7% of global cyberattacks. However, the variations in store technology can make it challenging to ensure consistent security standards and take rapid remedial action.

There’s also a broader issue: The severe IT labor shortage over the last few years has left IT departments across all industries stretched thin – while accelerating technology, security threats, and network reliability issues have caused the volume of help desk requests to skyrocket.  

Not surprisingly, turnover is high among overburdened help desk staff in the U.S., with a recent NICE WEM Global Survey estimating average attrition at a staggering 42%. As a result, many in-house help desks remain stuck in firefighting mode, with understaffed teams delivering inconsistent service and inadequate coverage.  

Tier 1 agent and desktop support analyst rank among the 10 most in-demand tech jobs for 2025 — causing salaries to also surge as companies compete for top talent: 

In this scenario, outsourcing help desk services has emerged as a leading solution for ensuring IT teams get the cost-effective resources they need to provide quality customer experiences in today’s dynamic and fiercely competitive retail landscape. A reliable, effective IT support partner can be the critical difference between a retailer’s ability to deliver a seamless customer experience and suffering outages during critical sales periods. Some 65% of organizations now outsource help desk support (Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey 2024). 

Yet, without the right strategy, industry expertise, and specialized knowledge, help desk outsourcing can struggle to achieve the right results. Retail depends on IT support more than any other industry, but its users are also among the most dissatisfied with their IT service experience, HappySignals’ 2023 IT experience benchmark report found.  

Outsourcing retail IT support: 10 simple steps to achieve value for your business  

Help desk outsourcing, when executed properly, can help retailers overcome challenges while focusing internal IT teams on core business functions. Below we touch on some of the key steps to successfully outsourcing retail support services.  

1. Start with an end goal in mind 

Too many IT outsourcing projects fall apart because retailers don’t begin with an end goal in mind. Identifying your business drivers for IT outsourcing – and aligning your leadership team and outsourcing provider behind them – ensures your service desk delivers the value you need. 

While help desk outsourcing is #1 for reducing IT costs, cost reduction is rarely an organization’s sole business driver. In fact, most companies are realizing they have been underspending in IT as digital transformation becomes essential to competing in today’s markets. 

Whether your goal is scalability, improved service consistency, expanded coverage and language skills, a higher strategic focus for IT, or another business driver, defining a clear vision from the start is key to accurately measuring your provider’s performance and setting the right expectations for the business. 

Learn more about the business drivers that should define your retail help desk outsourcing strategy by downloading our new guide, “Retail Help Desk Outsourcing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effective IT Support.” 

2. Clearly define service desk scope and expectations 

Many retailers running help desks internally do not have a clear understanding of their business requirements when it comes to ticket volumes, hours of operation, and staffing levels. It’s also critical to align end-user expectations with costs; for example, is lowering a 3-minute wait time to 5 seconds worth the price of staff and coverage required, or can 3-minute waits be acceptable? 

Investing time in thoroughly defining scope and expectations for your service desk provider is an essential step in the outsourcing process. Key considerations to keep in mind include:  

• Coverage hours required. While needs can change depending on the type of retail business and daily sales volumes, most retailers require continuous or extended support hours to accommodate in-store and online transactions, particularly as more stores double as mini-warehouses for fulfilling online orders.
• AI and automation capabilities. Ensuring your provider has cutting-edge tools to resolve high-volume, frequent issues is essential to speeding resolution rates and boosting end-user satisfaction. Automation is helping companies solve 80% of tickets in the first interaction for basic tasks like password reset, while AI-powered self-service is capable of independently resolving more than half (53%) of tickets raised, the 2024 Freshservice Service Management Benchmark Report found. 
• Extending support beyond IT. A growing trend toward unified care models is streamlining store support, offering the ability to monitor and manage all in-store technologies and operational support topics through a single support team. This saves store staff valuable time figuring out the right source for issues.
• Balancing service-level agreements (SLAs) with experience-level agreements (XLAs). While SLAs focus on specific metrics like resolution times, XLAs consider a broader range of factors including user satisfaction, usability, and the overall end-user experience to provide a more holistic approach to performance measurement. For instance, rather than just measuring average response time, an XLA can focus on ensuring POS system uptime for fast, uninterrupted checkouts. 

Learn all the considerations to keep in mind for defining service desk scope and expectations, and more detailed insights for each consideration, by downloading our new guide, “Retail Help Desk Outsourcing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effective IT Support.” 

3. Define your location strategy based on your business footprint  

IT leaders ranked physical proximity as the #1 factor for choosing an IT outsourcing provider on Computer Economics’ latest IT Outsourcing Statistics report – even if a lower cost could be achieved in a more distant location. Instead of looking for providers in far-off locations offering the lowest cost per ticket, retailers are increasingly prioritizing service geographically close service providers due to reduced operational challenges, easier management of data residency issues, and compatibility of language and time zone.   

Onshore locations incur the highest costs and have the most difficulty finding and retaining quality resources willing to work night shifts. The cost of replacing IT staff in the U.S. is also high – roughly equivalent to six to nine months’ salary, or about $35,000 to $52,000 in additional costs for an employee earning $70,000 per year, according to the latest HR Benchmarking report from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). 

Not surprisingly, Latin America has become a go-to destination for North American help desk organizations. Roughly 70% of retail brands plan to increase onshoring or nearshoring over the next three years to align operations like IT with locations that balance cost, resilience, and speed, states Bain & Company’s 2025 Retail Holiday Newsletter. Similar or overlapping time zones with the U.S. and deep pools of tech talent enable the real-time collaboration needed to resolve urgent IT issues quickly. 

While offering typically cheaper per-call rates, offshore locations like India and the Philippines leave many providers struggling to attract “A team” resources capable of resolving urgent help desk issues quickly. The latest World Economic Forum-endorsed INSEAD Global Talent Competitiveness Index underscores India and Latin America’s widening talent gap: India’s talent competitiveness has decreased every year since 2020 while top nearshore markets like Costa Rica, Colombia, and Mexico score significantly higher. 

Nearshoring makes sense from a cost perspective as well – average wages of tech employees in Latin America are just about 38% of those in the U.S., according to the 2024 CBRE Scoring Tech Talent report. Overall labor arbitrage averages 30-50% in LATAM, although savings can vary by country. 

Learn more about why enterprises are increasingly turning to geographically close outsourcing – and key benefits for retailers – by downloading our new guide, “Retail Help Desk Outsourcing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effective IT Support.” 

4. Account for hidden costs when you quantify your business case 

Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples when determining whether you should leverage an outsourcer or operate your help desk internally to achieve your goals. Too many organizations fail to realize the full cost of operating a service desk when building their business case, leading to an improper evaluation. 

Hidden costs like technology, quality assurance, knowledge management maintenance, and workforce management are built into vendor prices – but often overlooked as part of internal assessments. The cost of recruiting, retraining, and onboarding agents is another significant help desk expense that’s rarely considered. 

Outsourcing eliminates the pain and cost of handling this high turnover rate, keeping your time and money focused on business priorities. 

To learn the six other critical steps for successful help desk outsourcing – and receive more detailed insights on the four steps above – download “Retail Help Desk Outsourcing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effective IT Support.” 

What’s included in our Retail Help Desk Outsourcing Guide

Download our Retail Help Desk Outsourcing Guide  to learn everything you need to know to maximize the value of your outsourced help desk and ensure peak performance in your retail IT operations. Our 10-step roadmap expands on the above steps and more, including:   

• Top challenges to effective retail help desk support 
• How to determine help desk support levels and escalations beyond Level 1 
• Automation and AI capabilities that help you build a more proactive service desk 
• How to choose the right help desk model and location strategy 
• The importance of a unified care support model for smooth in-store operations
• XLAs vs. SLAs – how to measure metrics and customer experiences
• What to look for in a retail IT support partner  
• And more!  

Want to learn more about how help desk outsourcing can transform your retail operations? Schedule a consultation with our retail industry and help desk leaders today! Or, visit our resource center to learn more about retail IT trends, strategies, and success stories.  

Frequently Asked Questions