What is a Service Desk? And Why It is Important for Business
A service desk connects your support agents and whichever employees, customers, or other people require assistance. It can improve customer satisfaction and allow you to deliver superior services, as well as help your business to make better decisions and strategies.
But what is a service desk, what is service desk software, why is it important for your business, and how can it help you?
What is a Service Desk?
A service desk is a Single Point of Contact, or SPOC, between an organization and employees, customers, and business partners alike. It manages the IT assets of an organization and ensures that IT services are being delivered to everyone who needs them.
Service desks are designed to handle all kinds of service requests, both small and large. These can range from a minor technical issue faced by a single individual to system outages that can impact the whole organization and bring your business to a halt. A service desk will also implement and coordinate planned changes to services.
They work via a ticket management system, where users raise tickets and send them to the desk. From there, administrators can assign tickets to staff who will deal with whichever query has been raised by the user.
The Different Types of Service Desk
Depending on your organization, you can implement a service desk in several ways. Each type of service desks has advantages and disadvantages, as different organizations have different needs.
- Centralized Service Desk: This type of service desk ensures that all query resolution is handled through only one point of contact. It’s considered a particularly cost-effective and efficient method, as fewer staff members can manage larger numbers of tickets. Centralized control can be achieved by merging local service desks.
- Local Service Desk: This desk is located in or near a company’s offices. Small or medium-sized organizations may use this method. A local service desk can easily handle a limited number of support tickets and is very effective at addressing issues within the company location.
- Virtual Service Desk: This is the most common type of service desk used by organizations. Rather than being run from a set location, this method uses the internet to create a centralized service desk. This allows for ticket resolution, regardless of location, as well as easy ticket organization using geographical location. This type of service desk also allows an organization to efficiently track agent performance.
Service Desk VS Help Desk: What is the Difference?
These terms are often used interchangeably, but there are some differences between service desk and help desk.
A Managed IT help desk primarily focuses on fixing issues and breakages. A user will reach out to the support team for assistance when something breaks, and the agent can react to the issue and fix it.
A service desks can fix issues, but also handles all requests for services or information. Rather than being focused entirely on the user’s immediate needs, the service desk will focus on the business and develop long-term solutions to prevent incidents in the future.
The Importance of Service Desk for any Business
A service desk is a vital tool that allows organizations to answer customer, employee, and business partner questions. Not only this, but it also improves organizational workflow and processes, ensuring that the business will constantly develop its services and become more efficient.
Service desks can also reduce the risks of a major incident, such as the aforementioned organization-wide outage. This is because they allow businesses to find the root cause of these incidents, track their progress, and potentially mitigate the impact on the business and internal processes.
On average, a business that utilizes a service desk will have better first-contact and first-level resolution rates than a business that doesn’t. It also allows businesses to boost the productivity of service desks agents, manage service requests, track and resolve incidents in real-time, and manage IT assets from one place.
How a Service Desk Improves Organizational Workflow and Processes
A service desk enables organizations to improve their workflow and processes, as well as streamline customer support. It allows agents to collaborate with managers and other agents. This means that not only will all customer tickets be resolved, but they’ll be resolved accurately.
Agents can be monitored, allowing you to track individual performance and user satisfaction. You can use this data to ensure that your agents are trained to answer queries or can at least redirect it to another agent.
By improving collaboration and training within the organization, potential issues and inefficiencies can be resolved quickly.
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