ITIL defines the term "service desk" as "service operation" and is a single point-of-contact (SPOC) that connects the service provider (or user) and the service provider. TechTarget defines a service desk similarly as a communications center providing a single point for contact between the company's customers, employees, and business partners. It lets end users interact easily with the IT department.

What does an Service Desk Do?

The service desk is primarily an IT function. It handles service requests, tickets incidents, and ticketing. Service desk professionals depend on different ai service desk instruments to complete their job done. The modern service desks are more proactive and flexible and can adapt to a range of operational circumstances. They're process-oriented and work to meet the requirements of the business's IT policies.

Help Desk vs. Service Desk

While the capabilities of a help desk and an office desk could appear like they are similar, there are some important differences. A help desk offers technical support to customers, troubleshoots customer and user issues, and/or helps them to complete specific tasks and steps.

A service desk looks at business needs rather than only focusing on customer needs. It also takes the broader business context into consideration. It focuses on improving the effectiveness and performance of IT professionals, fulfilling service-level agreements and shaping the way IT professionals deliver their services to both internal employees and to customers. Help desks, which are an integral part of many organisations, is an aspect of the IT Service Desk. It is accountable for the satisfaction of users concerns, issues of the end-user, as well as needs.

What are the duties of a Service Desk?

Service desk employees have many responsibilities such as:

Service requests, issues and incident management

All departments within the company must be able to tackle IT problems

Monitoring customer complaints

Facilitating employee onboarding

Monitoring reports and metrics such as:

First-call resolution rate (FCR): The percentage of tickets resolved with first responses. FCR is a measurement of how efficient and fast your service desk works. This is crucial because it can help improve efficiency of your users.

Cost per contact is the total amount required for operating a service desk based on the number of calls or tickets received during a given period. It's a measure of how efficiently the service desk runs its business.

Incident/Ticket volume: This gives an overview of the peak activity times. It can be used to assess the need for staff and to plan your schedule.

Repeated Tickets: Companies can track the mean Time to detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) for repeated tickets. A decreasing trend for these measures indicates how effective the ai-powered service desk is in learning from past problems.

Trending in Tickets Sales This method allows you to monitor the trends in relation to the number of tickets sold for a specific issue during a given time period. It will help you to determine if there are additional automation requirements to stop or fix the issue.

Backlog of Tickets: Keeping track of ticket backlogs and focusing on improving efficiency can help reduce support and administration costs for your business.

Modern service desks also offer advanced capabilities such as:

Automating the calculation or enforcement of employee time allocations to services. This allows employees to monitor their performance and record the incidents that are most lengthy.

Automating escalates and remediation with rules-based processes: This enables you to determine the most important characteristics of incidents reported and route them to the correct pool of technicians.

A service helpdesk when combined together with other IT management tools, is able to provide seamless execution of IT operations in an organization.