Service Desk serves as a Point of Contact between a Business organization (IT) and its employees, customers, as well as business partners. They provide access to users and stakeholders to report issues, questions, queries and requests, and have them acknowledged, classified, owned and actioned.
Service Desk staff handle a wide range of requests. Starting from a Simple query to technical issues faced by individuals or system outages that impact the entire organization.
Service Desk services can be availed by the users thru different channels Like: chat, email, phone calls, service portals and mobile applications, Walk-in, text and social media messaging
Service Desk staff are required to answer or resolve a wide variety of questions and queries related to the many business area’s. To handle this, they need to be skilled and knowledgeable. Particularly they need to have excellent customer service skills such as empathy, incident analysis and prioritization, effective communications, and emotional intelligence. But the most important skill they require is to be able to fully understand (business priority) and diagnose a specific incident and to take appropriate action on it.
Different Service Desk structures are as follows:
There are a number of ways to set up a Service Desk. Few of them are listed below:
- Local Service Desk
A local Service Desk is one that is located in or near a company’s premises. In this case the Service Desk and their users are co-located at same Building or premise.
- Centralized Service Desk
Centralized Service Desk is a dedicated team working in a single location. They can cater to many different user groups. Like Service Desk team setting in Building 1 and catering to users from Building 1 , Building 2, Building 3.
You can set up a Centralized Service Desk by merging different Local Service Desks.
- Virtual Service Desk
A virtual Service Desk is set up to allow Service Desk staff to work from multiple geographically dispersed locations. Virtual Service Desk is now a days most popular type of Service Desk used by many companies these days. For a virtual Service Desk to work to it’s full efficiency, use of sophisticated supporting technology mainly internet and cloud-based is must. With that other technologies like interactive voice response, routing, automatic call distribution and escalation also are very much needed for ensuring good customer service.
Benefits of Service Desk:
Improved the Service Experience: A good service Desk improves customer satisfaction by meeting their expectations.
Greater Visibility: Setting Service Desk allows departments to know what is happening in all areas of the business such as current technical issues, areas of concern etc.
Better Communication: A Service Desk can answer wider range of queries and questions which help to have a better communication with the users and stakeholders