A service desk is a critical business resource to provide efficiency to the infrastructure and maximize user/customer satisfaction. From troubleshooting incidents to fulfilling service tickets, a productive desk offers high-quality service to users when they need it. Service desks are beneficial to small businesses because they maximize the quality of service and enhance the knowledge and skills of staff. Here are four great reasons to develop this function at your organization.
The primary purpose of an IT service desk is to be the primary designated single point of contact (SPOC) for overseeing user requests and addressing their question. It offers a communications channel between IT functions and the user community. Primary roles often include incident management, service requests, and software license collaboration, addressing change requests, and working third-party contracts.
What is a Service Desk, Exactly?
Organizations often use the terms “help desk” and “service desk” interchangeably, but they play different roles in reality.
Help desk benefits include processing support requests from end-users and resolving issues. A help desk typically concentrates on break-fix (incident management).
The service desk is a more evolved help desk. Its role extends beyond answering support requests and questions. This service center performs all the help desk functions, but it also oversees a broad spectrum of technology-related tasks. What differentiates it from a help desk is its concentration on customer needs and service delivery.
A service desk is a powerful, customer-oriented, targeted way to support, service, and deliver help to customers. It exists to provide users with appropriate assistance in a prompt manner. Some standard features of include:
- Integrated knowledge base
- Automated routing of tickets
- Comprehensive tracking and reporting
- 24×7 cloud-based access
- Management of SLAs
- Intuitive dashboards
4 Benefits for Your Company
The service desk offers organizations the potential to integrate technological innovations to maximize productivity and create usable workflows. Other benefits include:
- Aligning IT with other business departments — These desks assist in the collaboration between IT and different business silos, which helps to both fix and prevent breakdowns. It creates, assigns, tracks, and resolves user tickets.
- Improving asset management — A service desk functions as the centralized location for customer service communications and assets, including business hardware and software. This central location allows for simple retrieval of information, as well as configuration, maintenance, and valuation.
- Improving operational efficiency — A productive desk operation provides prompt support for the resolution and remediation of user issues.
- Providing consistency — These types of help desks are structured to provide consistent processes, repeatable solutions, and issue prioritization. Consistency gives the staff the ability to continually improve on the issue resolution process and more efficient service for end-users and customers.
Technology advances at a rapid pace. It can be very challenging for an organization to keep up on hardware and software updates and keep its IT team trained and up-to-date on all necessary disciplines. Internal service desks are becoming a thing of the past for many organizations. Companies increasingly realize the efficiencies of utilizing a dedicated, outsourced team. Managed services companies can provide external service desk capability, using industry experts and professionals who can share their expertise with multiple companies and their customer base.
Alliance IT employs a team of IT experts on the cutting edge of technology innovations, software updates, ransomware threats, and service issues all organizations face. We are here to help you maintain a proactive and experienced user support function for Sarasota area SMBs.
