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Technology is a boon and a bane for every business. It streamlines work and helps your company scale, but sooner or later, that technology experiences hiccups. When that happens, your business needs the technical support of a service desk.
In the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a series of best practices for the Information Technology (IT) industry, a service desk helps users with technical issues and questions. It’s a core component of delivering IT services to an organization.
As one of the ITIL processes, the service desk falls under the service operation step of the ITIL V3 service lifecycle. This means if your business offers technology products or services to internal or external customers, you’ll need to set up service desk operations.
The service desk acts as the single point of contact between your IT team and the users of your IT services. Your company’s IT services encompass any technology-related items used in your business. It could be the products you sell, or the software used by your employees.
When these IT services run into a technical issue, referred to as an incident, the service desk team steps in to solve the problem. The service desk also handles routine requests, such as setting up a new user account or resetting a forgotten password.
These requests typically come through an IT ticketing system. The system involves IT management software to allow users to submit requests or report incidents electronically.
Yet the service desk is more than a team that tackles technical challenges. It’s also the face of your IT organization to your technology users.
The service desk’s primary responsibility is to deliver value to the company by addressing your users’ IT needs. This is a core concept in IT service management (ITSM), the philosophy behind ITIL. The service desk creates the bridge between your business operations and your technology ecosystem.
The terms service desk and help desk are used interchangeably in many organizations. In the ITIL framework, the IT help desk is a specialized subset of the service desk.
While the service desk focuses on activities to further customer value, the help desk is more about addressing only a portion of the ITIL service desk processes, such as incident management. The distinction is subtle, which is why the service desk and help desk are often considered one and the same.
The way to differentiate the two is to remember that the service desk is about the big picture of delivering IT services to users, while a help desk is more tactical in terms of the nature of its work.
The service desk’s scope of responsibilities deliver several key benefits to your business:
Arguably the most important service desk responsibility is to resolve incidents. When the users of your IT services can’t perform their jobs or use your technology, work doesn’t get done, and productivity declines.
A service desk team that quickly responds to and resolves technical issues keeps an organization productive, allowing your employees to get back to work quickly. It also brings the benefit of improved confidence in your company’s technical prowess and creates a better customer experience.
The service desk reduces business costs by implementing automated workflows for many routine IT tasks.
Rather than a member of the IT team needing to address every user who's forgot their password, the service desk can set up a self-service portal where the user can walk through self-help capabilities within your IT system to reset a forgotten password themselves.
The same applies to other standard IT requests, such as setting up a new user account.
More importantly, the service desk saves your company an average of $300,000 per hour in lost productivity and sales by addressing technical issues, according to research firm Gartner.
In ITIL, recurring incidents hint at systemic issues called problems. The service desk tracks reported incidents, then performs an analysis to identify problems proactively so they can be addressed as part of ITIL’s problem management process.
ITIL classifies different service desk types based on several factors.
For example, the location of your service desk affects the structure of the team, since a global service desk supporting users in multiple time zones has different requirements than a service desk that only provides service desk functions to users in one location.
You can set up your company’s service desk using some common methods.
ITIL defines three types of service desk offerings.
The size of your service desk team and their location plays a role in how the team is structured. This type breaks down into four categories.
The service desk is the first to receive a notification of any technical issues or requests. From there, the IT organization may break down the service desk into a hierarchy that addresses requests based on severity or client value.
You can design a service desk to be a profit center or a cost to the business.
Your company has a choice for funding a service desk. You can build your own team, or you can outsource.
A service desk can focus on a specific audience.
The service desk fulfills a vital role in any company incorporating technology in internal processes or through selling digital products and services.
Many IT processes depend on the service desk to provide support, such as when executing release management to ensure any post-launch incidents are addressed in a timely manner, or in ITIL change management so that service desk personnel are aware of IT system changes.
With a robust service desk, your company is poised to get the most out of your company’s use of technology.
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