A strong IT help desk provides critical support for your organization. When customers need technical support or answers to important questions, help desk professionals resolve their issues and address their concerns. Dependable, informed IT support is essential to employee satisfaction, productivity and business health.
An IT help desk is a department or service that is the first point of contact for end users in need of technical support for their IT-related problems and inquiries. Key duties of an IT help desk include:
Without the help desk, employee productivity — and the productivity of the business — can suffer. The IT help desk ensures that business users have the technical support they require. This includes providing them with software and hardware, minimizing downtime and outages, preventing security or data breaches and solving IT problems large and small so users remain productive.
For nearly any business of significant size, failure to have an effective IT help desk can have devastating consequences for productivity, security and more.
The structure of an IT help desk might differ from one organization to another due to its size and services offered. The core purpose of a help desk is always the same: supporting users and ensuring they can go about their work without interruption. This is also why it’s important to be able to scale help desk services to meet changing demands.
If you're looking to establish IT support capabilities at your organization, you might be wondering whether you should call your new department a service desk or a help desk — or whether it matters.
While the difference between the two might seem entirely semantic, the concepts come from very different periods in the history of IT implementation. Each tells a different story about what your IT organization does and the level of service your end users can expect.
The concept of an IT help desk first emerged in the late 1980s. Throughout the history of IT, especially in the early 2000s, the terms help desk and service desk were often used interchangeably. As organizations began to develop IT infrastructure and incorporate IT into their business models, the IT help desk emerged as a department that could help organizations maintain functionality of their IT resources.
Traditionally, the IT help desk focused on the IT itself rather than the end user. Its goal was to ensure the ongoing operation of critical IT resources that allow the business to function. Early functions of the help desk included basic ticket management, incident resolution and fulfilling service requests from customers.
The concept of the IT service desk was born out of the ITIL framework, a widely adopted protocol that describes best practices for IT service management. As Gartner defines it, a service desk is an evolution of the help desk that’s “equipped with the resources for resolving service requests and problem calls. It gives the customer service representative or end user the ability to efficiently diagnose, troubleshoot and correct technical-support problems, rather than being a ‘pass through.’”
By implementing the right technologies and processes, a modern help desk can take advantage of up-to-date capabilities.
These streamline tasks, ticket routing and issue prioritization and can even suggest solutions for agents or proactively seek and resolve issues.
User-friendly portals with AI chatbots empower users to find answers, create tickets and troubleshoot common issues, reducing agent workload.
Satisfy user preferences via traditional means (email, phone) as well as web chat, social media and mobile apps.
Flexibility and scalability eliminate on-premises infrastructure and allow need-based resource adjustment.
Track key metrics with robust reporting and analytics to identify trends, optimize workflows, and measure support effectiveness.
Seamless integration with ITAM and CMDB tools provides a holistic IT view, streamlining workflows and proactive problem identification.
Start by soliciting feedback from each department that stands to benefit from your IT help desk, so you understand their greatest pain points and opportunities for improvement. With this input, create an implementation roadmap that prioritizes the most impactful improvements first.
Phasing in an IT help desk helps mitigate adoption issues and avoid issues and mistakes that require remediation and rework. Think about how you can work smarter and not harder; doing so will save you and your team countless hours.
Every smart business owner knows the right employees can make or break a company. This perspective is equally true with an IT help desk staff who interact daily with internal users. Here are tips on how to assemble the best possible team.
To get the right IT support staff in place, focus on hiring people who have the right combination of skills. And don’t undervalue the importance of soft skills. Personnel who are patient, empathetic and eager to solve problems are of great value, especially if they are level-one help desk technicians. Technical skills can always be taught.
When it comes to attracting the right talent, carefully consider the profile of your end users. Help desk staff working with doctors and medical staff, for example, will require a different approach — and possibly a different temperament — than those tasked with assisting students.
An understaffed IT help desk means problems don’t get resolved quickly and questions go unanswered. This situation will frustrate users and lead to poor productivity and outages — which can have a big impact on your business’ bottom line. An understaffed help desk will also result in burnout and high turnover rates among your best workers.
Establish a common knowledge base of internal support documentation to aid team members in quickly finding solutions to problems. Documentation will enable them to provide better service and make training new hires easier.
Fostering a sense of camaraderie and unity goes a long way toward keeping morale and team energy high — your end users will notice and appreciate a positive, enthusiastic attitude.
An effective IT help desk always focuses on the outcome of supporting end users and answering questions. Processes are important, but they should be formulated with end-user experiences and business needs in mind. Any process that hampers efficiency or stands in the way of end user productivity should be reassessed.
To fulfill business needs, a help desk must:
Set up service-level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs). The SLA sets expectations for the speed and completion of help desk tasks. This metric is how users and support staff know what service should be delivered. Having the right KPIs allows insight into when performance slips.
The goal of an efficient IT help desk is simple: Provide customer support so users can return to work with as little disruption as possible.
RELATED: 20 IT Ticket Handling Best Practices for Improved Service & Support
Don’t throw all your help desk team members into one box. They’ll eventually become overwhelmed with support tickets and requests. The smarter solution is to practice a divide-and-conquer mentality by structuring your help desk into support tiers.
A tiered system places help desk staffers into smaller teams focused on specific issues. One team might be dedicated toward rapidly categorizing and routing user questions and support inquiries to the right department. Another team is then tasked with responding to and working with the bulk of service requests but reserves the ability to forward nuanced or difficult problems to a specialized team. This multi-tiered support system is common in larger companies.
No matter the breakdown you choose, building specialized teams inside of your help desk department cuts down on chaos and ensures everyone can work efficiently. Allowing staff to zero in on specific responsibilities frees them up to provide better service.
The process of preparing and supporting individuals before a business implements something new is known as change management. Change management provides a structured approach that helps your company figure out the nuances of a help desk system.
Here are some best practices:
Automating certain help desk processes can go a long way toward smoothing out workflow. Companies sometimes rely on chatbots or artificial intelligence to answer basic customer questions or to siphon inquiries to a specific help desk staff member.
Automation should support your help desk but it shouldn’t be your help desk. In many situations, customers need answers to complex questions and help with more than one issue. Be sure to provide the right experience and connect them to real service people through email, chat, call centers and so on.
Other considerations about help desk architecture include security and regulatory compliance. Compliance is especially important when dealing with entities in the European Union who must adhere to General Data Protection Regulation.
When you map out what your help desk should do and how it should do it, process definition is crucial. Turning to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library can be useful to determine standardized workflows and policies you should implement. Remember: Processes are the routines your help desk follows to accomplish tasks, while policies are the rules they stick to when conducting these operations.
You’re probably aware that ITIL functions as best-practices guidance. But don’t feel like your company has to implement all practices to succeed. This feat is usually achieved by only the most mature organizations in the IT field. Your company should be savvy when it comes to ITIL — determine which practices are applicable to your organization and table the rest.
IT help desk support falls under the ITIL Service Operation lifecycle. The key aim is simple: Operate at a level where there are no issues while continuing to respond to day-to-day incidents and requests.
Processes undertaken in Service Operation include:
event management, access management, IT operations control, facilities management, application management, knowledge management, asset management and technical management. These processes deal with everything from prioritizing tasks based on events to granting user access, maintaining IT infrastructure and supporting applications.
Clear and concise goals are essential elements of effective service management. If your team is not clear on the type of support they should provide, proper response times, or what constitutes “successful” ticket management, service desk help will not be as effective nor as reliable as it could be.
A smart way to lay out expectations is to craft an SLA that establishes accountability for customers and support staff about how to measure performance and manage relationships.
A good SLA improves customer service and fosters better communication by providing users a thorough understanding of the type of support they can expect from your help desk. Make clear what issues are within and beyond the scope of your staff. It also can help set accurate response times. For example, an SLA can explain that a high-priority request will be addressed within one to five hours while an inquiry of low importance might have a five- to seven-day response time.
If your support team is having trouble adhering to aspects of the SLA, it’s time for an evaluation. It’s probably prudent to provide additional employee training, bring on more staff or implement new technology to meet demand.
KPIs can help your help desk monitor and adjust performance. These can keep tabs on performance for incident management and problem management processes. Common KPIs include:
All of these KPIs can help you get a clear picture of how well your help desk is operating. Use them to pinpoint problem areas, adjust efficiency and customer satisfaction and boost IT help desk team member morale by giving credit where it’s due.
Finally, aside from using KPIs, soliciting user feedback through customer surveys is a smart way to assess where your help desk is succeeding and falling short. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers for their honest opinion. All of this goes a long way in helping you understand the value your IT help desk brings to your business.
RELATED: Optimizing IT Service Desk: Structuring for Process Improvements
Once your help desk is up and running, make sure to get other employees on board. If a customer is speaking with another one of your employees about an issue, teach the employee to politely direct the customer to open up a help desk ticket.
It’s important to engage internal customers when educating them about how to use technologies. You can do this by including tips and tricks in weekly or monthly newsletters, releasing a company portal that offers training, creating an accessible knowledge base, hosting workshops, and more. Get creative and address common pain points—when customers know the value of using your technologies, they’ll want to learn how to become more proficient.
All customer interactions, in and outside of the help desk, are teachable moments that your company can reflect on for the future. Don’t pass up the opportunity to leverage the help desk internally.
What does your help desk do? This is a key question when choosing the right help desk software to support your business. Make sure you provide valuable and timely services while providing the right experience for your customers.
Implement tools appropriate for your business by considering the size of your organization, how help desk demands may scale over time, who you’re serving and how you want to solve customer issues.
Businesses large and small should think long and hard about implementing help desk tools, because there are different types to choose from.
At a basic level, IT help desk software solutions can automatically categorize tickets, give canned responses to customers who are waiting for help or open other communication channels besides a phone call or email.
At a more advanced level, some ITSM solutions now incorporate automation and artificial intelligence capabilities that can invisibly repair issues before users even know they exist, identify and manage devices across an entire network, and otherwise help your IT support “shift left” to drive faster remediation while freeing your team to work on more strategic tasks.
Don’t underestimate the importance of having help desk technology on your side. The right equipment can speed response cycles and ease the burdens on your support team while improving employee experience.
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The best IT support happens when your customers can support themselves. This might seem counterintuitive, especially if you’ve worked hard to build up an effective support team. Yet writing an online customer portal with FAQs or building a knowledge base for your services or products can dramatically reduce IT help desk burdens.
It’s a strategy that’s gained a huge amount of traction as companies try to address remote/hybrid work situations and rising demands on their IT teams. Recent Ivanti research found that 49% were already providing self-service options for basic IT requests.
Today’s employees and customers prize self-sufficiency. Many are reluctant to reach out to get IT help unless they really need it. Self-service resources empower them to look for resolutions on their own before filing a help desk ticket.
RELATED: AITSM: How AI is redefining IT service desk automation
The most often-used terms: