Have you ever heard the term IT help desk and wondered what it really meant? While many companies use these services to stay efficient and productive, there are still a lot of people out there who don’t know what it means to have IT help desk software with their business. The helpdesk started life as a function in the late 1980s, designed to support and fix IT issues. This highly technical environment focused on protecting and maintaining the technology, rather than looking after end users. Early IT helpdesk teams didn’t have any idea about things like time-based targets and SLAs for resolving issues. In the 1990s, the concept of customer-centric IT solutions came into the environment for the first time. The service desk became an important component of managing IT as a specific service.
What are Help Desk Features?
The IT help desk is a primary point of engagement between an IT organization and users. According experts, this convenient service desk emerges as the single point of contact between users and the service provider for the majority of day to day activities. While there’s no specific list of tasks that a desk needs to cover on a daily basis, it’s important to note that most of these landscapes manage incidents like service requests and disruptions, along with handling communications for planned changes and outages in a service. A service desk has a broad scope and it can provide the user with a single place where they can go for all their IT needs. This leads to the service desk playing a crucial role in promoting the integration of business processes with a complete technology ecosystem.
The Rise of the Help or Service Desk
Often, in a business landscape, it’s common or business leaders to try and do everything on their own. They learn as much as they can about the software and hardware that they rely on every day. From there, they can often deal with a wide selection of common issues on a regular basis. However, as the business space becomes more complicated, it’s becoming increasingly essential for companies to have the right service and solutions available.
Companies everywhere are now working hard to modernize and pursue better digital transformation initiatives, which means that the IT desk is once again evolving to become more focused on the business and all the data and processes it handles. Crucially, although one of the biggest help desk benefits that a company can access is the improvement of customer service solutions, a help desk isn’t the same as a customer call center.
A help desk is a resource that provides the internal user or customer with the information and support they need regarding a company’s products, services, and processes. On the other hand, the purpose of a help desk is to provide a centralized resource to answer questions, troubleshoot problems, and more. Common examples of help desk features include everything from product support and warranty functions to technical support centers and employee benefits decks. There’s also a wide range of other solutions offered through things like websites, toll-free numbers, email, and instant messaging.