What is a help desk?

The main advantage of a help desk is that it gives your IT users and employees a reliable resource for remediating problems and requesting services. But help desks offer other advantages for IT organisations as well, including the following:

Help desks bring together different support channels into a single, unified location. A help desk application can seamlessly transfer customers from one channel to another without interrupting the conversation. Support channels include a service portal, virtual agents, mobile application, integration with common collaboration tools and a walk-up experience for in-person conversations.

If IT agents are using personal inboxes to handle emails, there is a lack of visibility into what they are saying, if they are saying the right thing and how many cases they are handling. Help desks can gather essential information to help track agent growth and productivity, and provide you with the data you need to help improve your support services mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Tagging and analytics software provide insights into what is important to your employees and customers, based on their past interactions. You can paint a clearer overview of their needs and wants, allowing you to create a more personalised support experience. Reliable customer awareness also provides you with actionable insights into your own product, services and tools.

Although live-agent IT support options are valuable, there are many customers who would rather find solutions on their own. Help desks backed by a robust knowledge base give these employees and customers the answers they want to self-solve their issues 24/7.

Help desk automation allows teams to automate mundane, repetitive tasks. This may include sending out updates to employees, notifying agents or specific teams, and assigning incidents to the correct resolution teams.

Help desks exist to provide employees with important IT support in a way that is reliable, fast and convenient to access. To accomplish this, they depend on several core components.

Even with the world’s most-advanced technologies at your fingertips, at the end of the day, the success of your help desk will depend heavily on how well your IT support agents interact with employees. Staff your help desk with individuals who not only demonstrate IT aptitude and expertise, but who also have the interpersonal skills to patiently work with employees to resolve issues.

Support incidents and requests are records that allow a support team to monitor progress as they solve employee issues, allow multiple agents to collaborate and have a wider overview of the support experience. Omnichannel ticketing systems support a help desk as they track, prioritise, manage, respond to, organise and resolve IT cases.

Issue trackers allow an IT help desk to record issues and defects customers experience within a software product. This allows IT support agents, managers and engineers to track the issue until it has been resolved while also providing timely update notifications to employees who are waiting for answers.

Help desks gather valuable data on services, operations and employee customer satisfaction while providing insights into the performance of the IT team members. This analytical data can provide essential insights for improving your services and your business. Performance analytics enable stakeholders, including workers, owners and executives, responsible for service delivery to make smarter, real-time decisions. These analytics empower users with data visualisations to anticipate trends, prioritise resources and drive IT alignment with business goals.

Your on-staff experts are there to handle difficult IT issues and help workshop unique solutions; if they must spend all of their time resetting passwords, they’re not providing you with the best possible value. Self-service options empower customers to find solutions to common problems on their own, without having to loop in a live dedicated IT support agent.

Help desk software builds employee customer feedback into processes by providing the opportunity to automatically reach out to employee customers after an issue resolution to see if the customer is satisfied with the service they received.

Although most help desks provide the same basic service, no two businesses are going to demand the exact same functionality from their help desks. As such, there is no out of the box, one-size-fits-all help desk solution. Instead, help desks must be customisable, integrating apps and automations where needed, to better serve your employees and your IT department.

Although companies of all sizes can benefit from an IT help desk, the specific needs that a help desk addresses may vary depending on the size of the company.

It’s important to be delicate with employee customers, as growing businesses, with fewer employees, mean that each interaction needs to be very carefully aligned to help you go above and beyond for each employee customer. Everything from answering questions, to phone calls, to fulfilling special requests requires a level of commitment that will differentiate you from competition. A good help desk system will assist with functionality and scale with your small company as it grows.

Larger organisations need faster collaboration between teams—especially those outside of IT support. It can be easy for requests to get lost between multiple teams. The faster and more aligned the IT services team is with your operations and development teams and departments, the better you can serve your enterprise-level employee customers.