A service desk is the central nervous system that connects all your support resources with the people who need them. As your business grows, it becomes harder to manage all the requests you get from employees, partners, and customers. Service desks offer a way to stay organized and coordinate faster, more effective responses.
Although the concept is traditionally associated with IT requests, service desks can now handle a range of incidents and issues. Establishing one is more important than ever as companies expand into digital customer service. Artificial intelligence (AI) has also unlocked new opportunities to make service desks even more powerful.
This is your guide to understanding everything you need to know about service desks, including:
- What a service desk does
- What makes a service desk different from ITSM and help desk services
- The key service desk benefits for businesses
- How service desks work
- Best practices in operating service desks
What Does a Service Desk Do?
Service desks have become the command centre for offering prompt, personalized support. They have evolved into comprehensive platforms whose features span the following areas:
Incident and Request Management
Over the course of a single day, support teams can get inundated with a wide variety of requests — from employees who need a password reset to a department that needs a new application installed. Service desks help ensure nothing falls through the cracks by tracking everything from the point a request is made to the point it’s resolved.
Ticketing
Part of staying on top of issues is categorizing who made a request, what it involves, and which team member will handle it. A service desk ticketing system not only records requests as they come in, but also creates a streamlined workflow by categorizing tickets and simplifying the assigning process.
Omnichannel Support
The best service makes it easy to reach out for help in your preferred channel. Service desks enable users to make requests via email, chat, social media, and messaging apps. This omnichannel approach helps prevent phone call congestion, where users might be stuck on hold as employees struggle to work through the queue.
Knowledge Management
A lot of service requests ladder back to problems support teams have addressed before. That’s why it makes sense to keep track of common problems and fixes and centralize them so employees can quickly look up the answers they need. Smart businesses do this by setting up a knowledge management library with guides, articles, and other content that can offer tips and guidance.
Self-service
Plenty of service desk requests could easily be handled by the user on their own. A self-service portal empowers users to seek out answers to common questions and then walks them through troubleshooting techniques.
AI-enabled Chatbot Assistance
Self-service can also be powered by AI, with chatbots that provide a simple solution to an issue or direct users to FAQ-style content like a knowledge centre. Chatbots take a conversational approach to service that saves time for users and support teams alike.
Comprehensive Customer and Employee Insight
Service desks can do more than just handle pressing issues. They should also enable you to continuously learn about your organization’s needs and understand what best-in-class service should look like. Collecting data from every service interaction — and making it easy for support teams to pinpoint common problems and opportunities to improve the work they do — can provide a broader view of the employee-customer relationship.
Collaboration Tools
You’ll inevitably need to escalate some issues to a team member with deeper experience or a specific skill set. For other requests, a team member might have to consult with a manager before taking action, like if they need permission to access an application. Service desks foster this kind of collaboration by providing a hub that keeps everyone on the same page.
Live Video Assistance
We’ve all gotten used to video calls as a way of bringing together distributed teams for meetings. It’s a form of communication that works equally well in addressing service requests, where support teams can engage directly with users and talk through a troubleshooting issue no matter where they are.
Performance Metrics
Your goal as a support team should be to respond to users quickly and resolve issues correctly on the first attempt. Tracking performance data helps managers identify where they can provide coaching to individual employees, as well as processes that need to be changed to provide the best service levels possible.
What Is the Difference Between Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) and a Service Desk?
Don’t be confused if you come across the term “ITSM” when you reach an IT service desk. It stands for IT service management, and it’s not a different category of product but rather an overarching approach to aligning technology with business needs. ITSM principles can also assist businesses in complying with various regulatory requirements.
First outlined within the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and managed by industry standards bodies, ITSM looks holistically at the various IT services that run an organization, including how services are designed, delivered, managed, and improved.
An IT service desk can contribute to effective ITSM by creating a bridge between the support teams and users that depend on them. However, it’s just one potential component among others in an ITSM system.
What Is the Difference Between a Help Desk and a Service Desk?
A service desk is more than a help desk. When employees run into a technical issue with their laptop or applications, help desk software allows them to connect with someone in the IT department to resolve their issue. It’s a system that primarily manages break/fix tasks focused around an individual user.
The key differences between a service desk and a help desk are scope and approach. A service desk will receive requests about issues that could affect entire departments and the business as a whole. Instead of merely reacting to these issues as you would in a help desk scenario, service desks are designed to proactively address issues and work toward overall improvements in service and support.
Service desks often incorporate help desk-style features, but they represent a more business-centric and process-oriented platform that addresses the entire IT service lifecycle.
What Are the Benefits of a Service Desk?
According to the Sixth Edition State of Service, top customer service leaders focus on three key challenges: keeping up with customer expectations, transforming ineffective or inefficient processes, and dealing with insufficient tools or technologies.
How can a service desk help? By acting as a conduit for sending requests and managing issues, service desks bring much-needed centralization to business data. They also pinpoint where processes break down and identify what customers will need before they reach out.
A service desk can provide additional advantages such as:
Cost Savings
When databases crash or employees can’t access the tools they need, important tasks get delayed and customers may decide to take their business elsewhere. It can also be more expensive to fix IT issues that have been left unattended for prolonged periods of time.
A service desk accelerates the ability to see what needs to be done so incidents can be addressed quickly and customer retention remains high. The savings are even higher when self-service capabilities alleviate the workload on support teams, helping companies avoid hiring additional support staff they may not need.
Streamlined Issue Resolution
Businesses run more smoothly when there are consistent, repeatable processes for getting work done. This rule of thumb is especially true in the support world. Employees and customers shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel and figure out where to go for help every time an issue arises.
Instead, a service desk offers an intuitive way to submit requests, track each ticket, and provide a digital paper trail for any follow-up and long-term learning.
Increased Productivity
Service desks act as a one-stop shop for important troubleshooting information, which means support teams can dive right into a fix rather than waste time looking for answers.
Chatbots take productivity even further because they can deal with the most typical issues, often without a lot of human intervention. Even just being able to see open tickets at a glance helps support teams prioritize what’s on their plate and work strategically to get more done.
Better User Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores are bound to go up when issues are resolved quickly upon first contact, and when customers can monitor the progress of their request in real-time.
Service desks also improve the employee experience because, rather than working with antiquated tools or manual processes, employees can access and manage all the data they need to provide best-in-class support.
Improved Data-driven Decision-making
The analytics and reporting capabilities within service desks paint a picture of where your organization stands today in terms of support and where you can build in greater resilience and adaptability.
You’ll know what drives user satisfaction (and what doesn’t), as well as insight on the health of IT assets that may need to be repaired, upgraded, or replaced to prevent any business disruptions.
Stronger Collaboration Across Teams
IT is just one of many functional areas. The support teams within them should always be aligned on key objectives with their counterparts in sales, marketing, HR, operations, and other departments. Service desks help by unifying data and making it easy to work together on an action plan that reduces common challenges.
Seamless Integration with Existing Business Systems
The best service desk solutions don’t merely act as standalone products. They integrate with other tools and applications, such as your customer service platform. This eliminates the risk of data or processes becoming siloed and eases the burden for IT teams that would otherwise have to connect new tools with the rest of your tech stack.
How Does a Service Desk Work?
You can gain a deeper appreciation of service desks when you see them in action. The following scenario is a fictitious but representative example of where service desks become invaluable.
1. The Issue Arises
An employee wants to add a plugin to an existing application they use every day. It should be a simple job and could offer them greater capabilities. If something goes wrong, however, it could bring the application to a grinding halt and leave them unable to continue working.
2. A Self-service Journey Begins
The employee knows they can connect to a component within their company’s service desk that leads to a comprehensive knowledge centre with articles detailing tasks like installing plugins. They begin browsing and quickly find helpful information — but a few technical questions remain.
3. Automation Moves the Self-service Journey Forward
A chatbot window is available near the bottom right of the knowledge centre. The employee types in their question, and the AI-powered chatbot immediately responds with more detail.
Unfortunately, the additional information makes the employee wonder if the plugin they’re using is safe and approved by the IT department. It’s time to formally initiate a request, and the chatbot helps them submit it.
4. A Ticket Is Created
The service desk sees the request and creates a ticket that categorizes the request according to common issues the company has already defined. This process helps direct the ticket to the most appropriate member of the support team to take the next step.
5. The Support Team Responds
Through a live video chat, the user and the support team member discuss potential security risks and what’s involved in using the plugin. The support team member knows exactly how to install it, but it’s worth escalating the ticket to a more experienced colleague to double-check the risk factors.
The service desk intelligently routes this question, and the colleague gives the all-clear to move forward. The ticket is closed as the plugin goes live.
All through this process, the employee is able to track the progress of their ticket. Meanwhile, details about the incident are documented for reporting and further analysis within the service desk, helping streamline the process of installing similar plugins in the future.
Best Practices for Service Desk Operations
Once you decide on a service desk solution, you can maximize its impact on your business by adopting the following approach.
Optimize for Self-service as an Ideal Starting Point
The Sixth Edition State of Service found 81% of high-performing service organizations provide a service chatbot compared to 49% of underperformers. It’s a great way to make sure your support team members are only tasked with the kinds of tickets that demand their skills and expertise.
Beyond deploying a chatbot, take the time to reassess the content within your knowledge centre or FAQ pages. Updating and enriching this content will make self-service more effective for users and will give an AI-powered chatbot more to draw upon.
Finally, consider how users are most likely to reach out for help, and use an omnichannel perspective to set up mechanisms to make doing so fast and easy.
Prepare Users to Make the Most of Your Service Desk
People tend to reach out for customer support without realizing they could solve problems themselves. Yet Salesforce research shows 61% of customers would rather use self-service for simple issues, and self-service solves 54% of customer issues at organizations that use it.
Accompany any service desk deployment with a communications plan that makes all the relevant stakeholders — customers, employees and even partners like suppliers — aware of your self-service features and how they work.
Providing upfront training to employees on how to find answers in your knowledge base could significantly reduce the number of tickets a service desk needs to generate.
Balance Automation with Human Intervention
Sometimes, complex issues will require users to move forward with a request that generates a ticket. Technology will play an equally strong role here: 91% of service organization professionals surveyed by Salesforce report that automation offers a major or moderate benefit in improving focus on individual customers.
Map out how tickets should be categorized based on the type or severity of the problem, factoring in the size of your support team and how you’ll use your service desk to coordinate assignments effectively. Take into account moments where issues might have to be escalated to a more experienced team member or even a manager. Your service desk can be set up with business rules to automatically route to the most appropriate person.
Break Down Silos Between Service Desks and Other Systems
Technology delivers better results when platforms and tools work holistically. It’s why 80% of agents told Salesforce that better access to other departments’ data would improve their work.
Your service desk should be tightly coupled with your customer service software, as well as operational and functional systems — such as HR — that could fuel AI with additional data.
Use Your Service Desk to Enhance User Experiences
You’re not just getting through tickets with a service desk. You’re developing a better customer experience, employee experience, and even partner experience. Addressing problems should not only be fast and easy, but also done in a way that makes people feel supported.
You can deliver this level of experience by using data to personalize service based on a user’s prior interactions. Real-time reporting can help you monitor and keep customers in the loop so they know when their issue will be addressed.
Experiences can be developed even further by taking the time to gather feedback through surveys. Then, it’s a matter of taking concrete actions — like refining service desk operations, adjusting workflows, and adapting new tools based on what you’ve heard and learned — to improve service.
Key Takeaways for Service Desk Success
Having a service desk in place means your business will be better positioned for growth than ever before.
Instead of getting mired in support issues, you’ll be able to offer a cohesive, coordinated response that leaves users feeling empowered.
You’ll also gain a lot of insight into what drives high performance across your operations and how to optimize technology, people, and processes in the future.
Ready to learn more about how service desks bring the power of AI, data, and your CRM together? Request a demo today.
