What is a Help Desk and Its Importance for Your Organization

Technical support is a multi-dimensional resource, designed to help reduce downtime and make IT services available as long as possible. It focuses specifically on end-user functionality and is therefore responsible for the rapid resolution of immediate needs, incidents, and technical issues for end-users.

Any essential functional technical support must be able to provide technical assistance to get the end-user back to work. As part of best practices, technical support often uses special software to record, track, and manage problems raised. Besides, the tips included in the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) methodology are used to achieve optimal performance.

Some of the features of a practical help desk are:

Ability to track all incoming incidents

Functions as a single point of contact (SPOC) for IT support

Provides essential problem management, contains problem escalation procedures, and supports specialized external groups for higher-level incidents

It focuses on the events and problems of end-users.

Collaborative and easy to use.

Maintains the database of all reported incidents and actions are taken

Ability to create monthly, semi-annual and annual reports on the number of problems, the response time, the time required to resolve the issue and the integration of these parameters in an SLA (Service Level Agreement)

Difference between the help desk and the service desk

The difference between a "help desk" and a "service desk" is more profound than that based on semantics and terminology. While the two terms were traditionally used interchangeably, in 2007, with the introduction of the International Library for Information Technology (ITIL) v3, the difference became more visible, and the use was stratified. While technical support looks at managing the overall process, it is part of the final process and focuses on the needs of end-users.

Following ITIL v3 best practices, technical support is one of the components of general service management and provides information to technical support through defined processes and software.

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