Advantages Of Service Desks
The IT service desk is a major component of any successful organization. What is its main role? In short, it is the middle layer between the entire company and its technology. That includes every computer system, server, IT-related asset, software, and cloud-based programs. This point of contact role is perhaps the defining characteristic of any competent service desk. But, even in a profitable, healthy organization that has its house in order, what are the key advantages that service desks provide, among the hundreds of things they do? Here are some of the top-ranking benefits that any company can get from a fully operational service desk, as well as an essential delineation between two often-confused terms.
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Keeping Definitions Straight
It's important to maintain separate definitions for two terms that are often confused, the help desk and the service desk. One is a subset of the other, service desks being the larger of the two. In the absence of a help desk, a service desk can perform that function, namely resolving issues for end users who face problems with the company's systems, services, or goods. A help desk is an add on to preexisting IT action.
Excellent Management of the Company's Assets
Your assets include things like contracts, inventories, bank accounts, real estate, software, hardware, and everything owned by the organization. Service desks come into the inventory picture when we speak of IT-type assets, like software, contracts, and hardware. They're essentially a central location for that entire category of assets. When it functions properly, the service desk allows employees to set values to assets, retrieve information about them, check on maintenance schedules and histories, configure them, and much more.
All-Department Alignment of Goals
Because service desks act as interpreters between IT and every other department in the company, it's obvious that this role is indispensable. They're necessary for a streamlined mode of communication between IT and everyone else, and go a long way toward minimizing glitches through smart ticket management. For example, when your IT team has a coordinated method for creating tickets, assigning them to the right personnel, tracking them as they move through the system, and resolving the initial issues, then the service desk is doing its job correctly. At every level of the company, informed decision-making is within reach when IT and other parts of the organization are in constant communication via the service desk.
Streamlined Decision-Making
When it comes to making wise decisions based on IT information and data, the service desk is the central point of interest. There's a wealth of data behind every good decision. Where does it come from? Mainly it originates performance results, product analysis, and issues that have arisen in the past. When all that data is collected and stored in one accessible location, every decision maker benefit from having access to it.
Better Efficiency for All Operations
When all the core IT processes are brought into synch with best-practices ITIL guidelines, it's much easier for the principals of the company to do strategy-tracking and other types of IT planning. Much revolves around the SD, and when it's functioning as it should, the entire organization benefits.
Stronger Library of Information
Storing information about problems within a knowledge database is a huge benefit to your business, customers, and employees. Should future issues arise having this strong library of information means that staff can save valuable time seeking a resolution. Time can also be saved for your customers as well. By taking advantage of this technology and publishing the answers to common questions for your customers to reference you are cutting out the middleman in scenarios where the resolution is consistent and common.
Quality Improvement
Both help and service desks can contribute to the improvement of a company’s product or service. When customers call a help desk typically specialists will fill out problem reports detailing the call. Companies can then use these reports combined with their service desk software to track and analyze these reports. If several customers call describing the same problem, quality control and potentially senior management can both be alerted so that the company can investigate the problem and establish a resolution swiftly.
Adapt Quickly to Change
When your IT service desk has a knowledge base you have a central area to store new documentation immediately. So, when your organization is asked to support a new piece of tech or service you can pick it up quickly and offer quality support from day one. This can mitigate issues regarding employee training and retention as well. In this instance the documentation simply gets categorized and input into the knowledge base and is ready to go live. There is not an excessive amount of time spent training agents and hoping they will be able to recall exactly what needs to be done exactly when the problem arises.
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