Any company’s top priority should be to satisfy its customers by promptly answering their inquiries and resolving their problems. Therefore, if you have a large number of employees, customers, or other parties who require ongoing assistance, service desk software can facilitate communication between your support staff and all of these individuals. When you have a reliable service desk, you can meet your customers’ needs and increase their pleasure. Hence, with this data, your company can make educated decisions about how to best allocate resources, oversee IT assets, keep in touch with customers, and cut down on support expenses. Find out the role of an IT service desk and how it differs from a help desk( service desk vs help desk) by reading this blog post.
What Is a Service Desk?
A service desk is an organization’s central point of contact for its staff, clients, and partners. They deal with all kinds of service requests, from minor ones like fixing a printer to major ones like fixing a network failure that affects the whole company.
In addition, service desks are flexible enough to accommodate requests of any size. Problems with technology can range from those experienced by a single employee to those affecting the entire company and bringing it to a standstill. Changes to services can be coordinated and implemented with the help of service desks. Users create tickets in a ticketing system and submit them to the help desk for resolution. From there, administrators can route tickets to the appropriate team members to address the user’s concern.
Types of Service Desk
There are different ways service desks can be set up, depending on the organization. Hence, because the requirements of various businesses might vary greatly, there are pros and cons associated with each type of service desk. Thus, they include:
#1. Local Desk
It serves the needs of a medium- or small-sized company and is located either on the firms premises or in close proximity to those location. It would be helpful in meeting the requirements of entities of a firm that are organized according to location. Nevertheless, an immense number of calls or demands for support would be too much for this service desk to effectively deal with.
#2. Centralized
The resolution of all inquiries is taken care of by a single person acting as the point of contact for this form of the service desk. Hence, because a smaller number of employees can manage a greater volume of tickets, this strategy is hailed as one of the most successful and economical approaches. It is possible to obtain centralized control by integrating several local service desks.
#3. Electronic
This is utilized by the vast majority of companies. This approach utilizes the internet to build integrated service desks rather than operating from a single location, as is traditionally done. This makes it possible to resolve tickets regardless of the user’s location and makes it simple to organize tickets according to their geographical location. Additionally, this kind of service desk makes it possible for a business to accurately monitor the efficiency of agents.
#4. The Service of Following the Sun
In order to provide support around the clock, several businesses combine the resources of multiple support desks situated in different parts of the world.
Read also: SERVICE DESK ANALYST: Definition, Duties, Salary, and Interviews
IT Service Desk
IT service desks are designed to facilitate contact between users and IT staff, resolve issues as they arise, and improve the overall expertise in the workplace. In addition, IT service desks are the central point of contact for users, including workers and additional stakeholders, and the company’s various service management functions. They help with complaint management, software licensing administration, tracking software changes, and managing communications with third parties.
Benefits of IT Service Desk
The benefits of IT service desks include:
#1. Optimizes the Management of Assets
With the help of service desks, your company’s software, tools, and any contracts can all be kept in one place. It also simplifies tasks like data retrieval, asset assessment, structure, and upkeep.
#2. Improve the Effectiveness of Operations
Service desks can improve the execution and tracking of IT-related strategies by standardizing IT operations.
#3. Coordinate It With Other Business Functions
It helps you establish, allocate, schedule, and resolve issues. Service desks foster interaction and cooperation between IT and other departments. Thus, this allows you to fix and avoid unnecessary mistakes and failures.
#4. Decisions Are Made Based on Data
In order to make better IT decisions, service desks collect and preserve information on problems, products, and their performance.
Furthermore, service desks operate as the organization’s main interface with its IT infrastructure. It’s the engine that propels companies to take advantage of cutting-edge tech to boost productivity and usher in more efficient, user-friendly, and secure processes befitting the modern age.
Service Desk Role
The role of the service desk includes the following:
- Handling customer complaints, breakdowns, and accidents.
- Helping every division with their IT issues.
- Logging complaints from customers.
- Facilitating the hiring process.
- Determine the root cause of difficulties and issues.
- Log the questions asked and how they were answered.
- Encourage the spotting of issues.
- Help people figure out what to do next.
- Keep an eye on problems from onset to conclusion.
- Give critical assistance with online safety issues.
- Handling client reports and requests for service sent via the Self-Service portal, email, or phone.
- Making customer service requests and issues.
- Establishing a hierarchy for fixing problems according to their severity and urgency.
- Conducting probes, making diagnoses, and looking into potential remedies.
- Controlling service requests to avoid security holes.
- Processing service requests and handling incidents.
Service Desk Software
Service desk software is what makes IT service management possible in an organization. When problems develop with the company’s IT infrastructure, workers can submit requests for assistance through a portal and obtain responses from the IT department. Thus, both issues and service requests can be handled by various service desks softwares. In many cases, these applications also include the implementation of change, handling assets, and knowledge management solutions. This application also makes it possible for IT departments to stay organized and answer staff questions quickly. The major difference is that this type of platform is used to handle requests for help from people outside of the company.
The Best Service Desk Software in 2023
#1. Jira Service Management
Jira’s popularity stems from the fact that it’s easy to set up, flexible enough to accommodate change, and powerful enough to help teams deliver consistently stellar customer service. The free version of Jira has a user cap of three users, or ten people. You can also try out Jira risk-free for seven days by signing up for either the basic or premium membership.
#2. Vision HelpDesk
This is one of the service desks from Vision Helpdesk that can help your service agents organize their work so that customers will receive consistent, high-quality support. This system can automate numerous tasks such as transition, safety, and information-level management. Vision Helpdesk is a cloud-based, flexible software solution for service teams in any business. Vision’s gamification element is one of its most distinctive features; it provides extra motivation for your company’s agents to hit their goals.
#3. Slack
This is one of the simplest add-ons you can make to your various service desks. So, if you have the correct mobile apps, connections, and workflows, Slack can even replace your service desk software.
Even if you don’t want to completely replace any of your service desks with Slack, you can still use it to streamline your team’s communication, handle tickets, collect and archive answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), and more. Slack offers a free subscription with limited functionality to see if it works with your service desk.
#4. GoTo Resolve
The goal of GoToResolve is to make it easy for your agents to adopt ITIL best practices and start using a service desk. GoToResolve, when completely developed, provides a sleek interface via which users may locate relevant support materials.
In addition, GoToResolve’s system administration allows agents to swiftly diagnose and fix issues by viewing users’ devices and locations.
#5. SolarWinds Service desk
This is an excellent option to consider when searching for software to use as a service desk for IT departments. This service assists businesses in establishing IT governance and maintaining user satisfaction. IT teams use it to manage their inventories, identify compliance concerns, arrange contract and licensing paperwork, and deliver outstanding service to customers. The software offered by SolarWinds is provided as a software as a service (SaaS) solution and is suitable for businesses of any size. It offers robotics, administration of assets, remote entry, and many more capabilities right out of the box. SolarWinds offers a free trial period of thirty days, after which pricing begins at nineteen dollars (USD) per month for each technician.
Why Do You Need Service Desk Software?
You will find that managing and responding to client requests is much simpler and more effective with this approach. Your clients will also be able to assist themselves via the software service desk. It provides them with a location to record their problems and monitor their growth without having to contact, email, or text you about it.
In addition to this, the service desk software offers you and your clients a transparent perspective, complete with transparent data and reporting. Your clients will have the capacity to help themselves thanks to the comprehensive understanding base, which provides immediate answers to frequently asked issues and gives them the power to help themselves. This will reduce the workload placed on your IT personnel.
Therefore, with the help of the service desk software, tickets may be made for actions that are required from other components and for actions that have been completed, giving your team a single full IT system for management.
Service Desk vs Help Desk
The following descriptions should help clarify the distinction between a help desk and a service desk:
- The primary goal of a help desk is to resolve problems and repair broken items. When a user encounters a difficulty, they may contact the support staff for help, and an agent will then respond to the request and attempt to resolve the problem. Service desks, on the other hand, not only manage demand for goods or information but can fix problems. The service desk will emphasize corporation and long-term disaster prevention over user requirements( service desk vs help desk).
- IT management falls within the purview of service desks. They execute and plan technological initiatives, while ensuring that the company’s demands are met. Their mission is to use technology in a way that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of corporate operations. However, the service desk is an example of a support center that does more than just answer inquiries; it also helps with a wide variety of IT-related duties. To put it another way, it’s not a support desk( service desk vs help desk).
- The service desk is part of a business-oriented IT service delivery paradigm, unlike the help desk( service desk vs help desk).
- In order to meet the demands of its clients, service desks provide a wide variety of services. Their goal is to find solutions to more issues in less time. They make it possible to combine the management framework with business operations. In contrast, the help desk is there to answer questions and address concerns from actual users in real-time.
Is Service Desk a Stressful Job?
Service desk workers deal with pressing issues and tension all day. Thus, some enhancements can boost service desk staff satisfaction and value to your firm.
What Is the Career Path From Service Desk?
After gaining experience as a Service Desk Technician, professionals have the option of moving up the career ladder to roles like Supervisor or Manager, Contract Coordinator, etc.
References
- hubspot.com
- extnoc.com
- sysaid.com
- kaseya.com
- bmc.com
- g2.com
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