What are service desks?

Service desks are a mechanism that is used to develop a bridge between organizations and consumers. A core tool for maintaining the quality of IT services, service desks are in charge of the services offered by the IT department, like managing the tickets raised, resolving the problems, and coming up with ideas for future upgrades.

According to the ITIL, a service desk is an upgraded version of a normal help desk. While the primary motive of a help desk is resolving the issues, a service desk has the core objective of giving proper quality services to customers. So, the help desk is for basic IT functioning, and the service desk is a more strategic use. 

‍

The importance of service desks

Service desks are the main tools of IT support for all the people associated with an organization. 

A service desk is an important part of any organization, the best tool that can be used for managing the service quality of the IT department. Service desks are equipped with capabilities to handle and manage issues such as managing service requests, managing incidents taking place, management of knowledge, portals offering self-service, reporting performance, etc. 

Benefits offered by service desks

The service desks play a crucial role in the growth of remote working and digitalization. Employees who work remotely have a crucial requirement for technology that is reliable and fast. 

Some of the significant benefits of service desks include: 

• The efficiency of operations: Service desks maintain IT processes, and manage routine tasks as much as possible. It is efficient in responding to incidents faster while making the operations as cost-efficient as possible. Taking the help of technology that is offered by a service desk can lower response time from minutes to seconds.
• Greater balance between business operations and IT services: The service desks act as a bridge between users and the IT services of a company. This provides the company with valuable and worthy insights into customer satisfaction, allowing active problem solving and planning for better IT services in the future.
• Increase of productivity: The self-service tools and smooth workflow makes the quality of IT service higher which in return satisfies the customer. This helps the customers save valuable time and lets the IT department focus on other things that can be more strategic for the business. 
• More reliability: Service desks speed up the process of incident solving and reduce the risks of a mix-up or problems. It keeps improving the business and reduces the cost to a minimum. Several health insurance companies reduce their costly service calls with the help of service desks.

How to use a service desk

1. Diversify your IT team as per need

The variety of tickets can often be a bigger challenge than the volume of tickets. In most companies, there is a dedicated level-one support team that runs back and forth between customer account management, hardware, and desktop support, network and office infrastructure, system and application change requests, and maintenance. 

The first major lesson is to stop spreading a variety and volume of work across a single team. Instead, you should divide it into more specialized teams:

• Office engineering- It is used to handle the local network and technology needs as each location has its own unique needs.
• Workplace tech- It covers your workplace productivity tools like your travel booking system, etc.
• Finally, your service desk team that operates globally.

Now each team receives work that is based more on their area of specialization. Plus, these areas of specialization allow team members to become experts in a particular domain. Now they can resolve incidents and problems faster because their deep-rooted knowledge is being used, and they are able to be more focused.

2. Introduce a portal for the customers

Customers should be able to ask for help whenever they need it. You can use a service desk to provide any customer the help that links the IT service desk and many other departmental service desks like HR, legal, etc. So customers can now find whichever service they need in one single place.

Getting to this portal is very easy too. New employees should be given training on this portal so that they know how to quickly and easily get help from day one.

3. Promote self-service for customers

After introducing self-service, you have to make sure that it is easy to use. Question and answer communities and knowledge bases can also be helpful. You can even set up an FAQ section. They act as great tools for self-help. 

4. Aim for bigger improvements

Like most IT companies, you should definitely keep an eye on key operational metrics. What matters most for the organization should be your main focus. To summarize, you should put the experience of the customer first and then spend your time researching the trends and methods that can help you make bigger improvements.

Try studying the ups and downs in data, and then try to get to the bottom of what causes “good” experiences and what causes “bad” experiences for customers. Getting to know the low volume and high volume days for your team will be of immense help as it will help you plan better. Trying to prevent incidents is more important for both the effectiveness and the happiness of your support analysts than just solving them. 

Companies have to keep their resources, including human resources, to a minimum, but continue doing the same job and trying to increase the quality. Therefore, the segregation of roles and responsibilities is necessary so that everyone knows what is expected of them and how they should do it. This is required to increase efficiency and productivity. The process of creating service desks can be difficult and time-consuming, but the benefits far outweigh the problems. Service desks are the new solution to existing IT problems.

‍