What Does an IT Service Desk do?

The primary role of an IT service center is to serve as the primary point of contact for monitoring / owning incidents, responding to user requests/questions, and providing a communication channel between other service management functions and the community of services. users. In addition to these essential functions, the service center often plays an active role in capturing change requests, managing third-party support contracts, managing software licenses, and helping with problem management.

In some organizations, the service desk is integrated with other business processes, such as:

• Employee integration
• Integration acquisition
• Data access management
• Integration and disconnection of suppliers/partners.
• Reports and metric management
• Business continuity management
• Infrastructure/service monitoring

Benefits of an IT Service Desk

Savings and scalability

Cost savings and scalability are the two most common benefits companies look for when implementing an IT support service. A well-staffed, well-staffed service center can handle much of your routine IT work. The service center offers organizations a relatively inexpensive option to transfer the simple work of expensive engineering teams and subject matter experts, allowing them to focus on activities that add more value to the business. The service center can also provide the company with a means to provide ongoing support to global operations and distributed user communities.

A finger on the pulse of user sentiment

The service center is the starting point for many key IT processes and services, and as such is often the primary interface between users, business processes, and the IT departments that activate them. Monitoring this interaction provides valuable insight into user satisfaction, service sentiment, and unmet features and needs that IT departments may address in the future.

Early warning of possible problems.

Due to the volume of problems and requests handled by the service center, with the appropriate data and tools to assess patterns and trends, the organization can use the service center as a monitoring tool to identify and resolve preventive service problems. " early warning system "provided by the service center can enable proactive problem management, preventive maintenance and service modifications to reduce the impact of interruptions and service degradation on users.

IT Service Desk Best Practices

Businesses have operated IT service centers for many years, and some of the best practices have emerged from these operations.

Customer commitment

• Examine the customer's behavior and expectations to make sure they understand your needs.
• Provide a 24-hour self-help portal for the end user (even when their service center is closed)
• Use SLAs and priority / severity rankings to differentiate requests so you can answer the most critical questions first
• Try to resolve issues at the first point of engagement and avoid transfers, escalations and the need for reminders
• Conduct regular customer satisfaction surveys to understand what your customers think about the services they receive

Service Desk Management and Reports

• Use real-time support reports, dashboards, and analytics to monitor operations and initiate corrective action before problems become problems.
• Make sure the escalation and transfer processes are clear and well understood to avoid lost SLAs
• Take advantage of the analytical capabilities of your ITSM system to reduce the time and effort required to generate reports
• Make sure management is experienced in your service center operations to better understand what service center staff are doing and the challenges they face
• Treat service center staff as professional communicators and problem solvers, giving them the tools they need to succeed

Use of technology to support the computer support service

• Implement service request workflow capabilities in your support software to help orchestrate escalations and transfers
• Provide automation capabilities for common user requests (login, password reset, etc.)
• Use your service center software to facilitate and record communications between agents and requesters.
• Integrate your Service Desk systems into your larger ITSM to provide agents better access to information about the IT environment

Knowledge management

• Implement a knowledge management system to capture knowledge in a location accessible to multiple people.
• Provide answers to frequently asked questions directly to end users, eliminating the need to contact an agent
• Keep your knowledge records up-to-date and accurate by reviewing and purging knowledge records frequently