Help-desks and service-desks are terms that often get tossed around interchangeably. But do you know which one your organization needs? Service desks and help desks have important roles within your customer support strategy. Each one offers distinct capabilities and value to your organization’s support infrastructure.
Your organization needs a comprehensive and proactive IT solution to manage technical issues and improve all your IT systems. Instead, you opt for a solution that primarily handles day-to-day technical support. The consequence of such a choice can be disastrous. Choosing the wrong “desk” for your organization can lead to inefficiencies in your customer support system, resulting in frustrated customers and lower CSAT scores.
To protect your organization from expensive mistakes, you must understand what help desks and service desks are and how they differ.
Key pointers
- A help desk is a support system that handles end-user issues and troubleshoots IT outages related to your product or service. A service desk offers strategic support by integrating all IT systems, offers solutions to issues, attempts to find root causes, and improves customer support efficiency through data and ITSM.
- Help desks offer reactive support, whereas service desks are proactive in their approach. The support scope of a help desk is incident management while service desks have a broader scope that includes incident management, service request management, problem management, self service, knowledge bases, etc.
Help desk vs. service desk: Key differences
A helpdesk provides IT support, focusing on troubleshooting and resolving technical issues. However, a service desk, manages IT services, incidents, and service requests to align IT with business needs. Here’s a closer look at the nuances:
- Help desks serve customers and employees by helping them find information about your products and services, troubleshooting IT problems, and offering end-user support to various issues as and when they arise.
- Service desks serve your organization by resolving end-user problems while also bringing the entire IT infrastructure together to improve your overall support strategy. They focus on identifying why issues arise and finding solutions to prevent future problems.
Aspects | Help desk | Service desks |
|---|---|---|
Focus | Resolves IT issues and offers end-user assistance. | Manages IT services across the organization with the aim to improve support systems. |
Who they serve | Individual customers and employees. | The organization. |
Support level | Reactive: Offers short term solutions to immediate issues. | Proactive: Anticipates issues to improve IT support systems. |
Model | Break-fix model: Solves issues as they arise. | Big-fix model: Fixes and prevents issues to meet business goals. |
Interaction | Interacts directly with end-users to resolve immediate problems. | Interacts with end-users and collaborates with multiple departments to ensure support services meet expectations. |
Scope | Incident management and Advanced engineering support | Incident management ,Service request management ,Problem management ,Change management ,Self-service and Knowledge bases |
Benefits of help desks and service desks
Help desks and service desks improve employee productivity by reducing the time they spend on repetitive tasks. For customers, help desks and service desks facilitate faster and more consistent responses to queries. They can also help customers find solutions without waiting for an agent by redirecting them towards self-service resources. Customers are more likely to have a pleasant customer experience when they find solutions to their problems quickly.
With help desks and support desks, you are better positioned to:
Make smarter decisions:
Help and service desk gather valuable data on common issues customers face. This data helps you spot trends, make intelligent data-backed decisions and prevent future issues.
Eliminate manual support:
You can automate your customer support help desks and services desk to prevent your support team from getting bogged down with repetitive tasks. Agents can now spend their energy on resolving higher-level issues and requests.
Improve customer satisfaction:
Satisfied customers are loyal customers, and nothing improves satisfaction such as quick, accurate, and efficient support. Help desks and service desks reduce response times and deliver consistent support so that your customers feel valued and taken care of.
Offer self-service:
Intuitive knowledge base portals, interactive FAQs, or automated chatbots, offered by help and service desks empower customers to help themselves. This reduces the load on your support team and makes it easy for customers to resolve minor issues quickly.
Create effective knowledge bases:
Help desks and service desks enable you to create informative knowledge bases. They do this by identifying gaps in your existing knowledge base with the help of the extensive data they collect.
Features to look for in help desk and service desk solutions
1. Chatbots and automation
Intelligent chatbots and automation features can address your most common support queries without your involvement. This frees up your time to focus on complex problems and ensure customers are satisfied with quick responses.
For example, DevRev’s PLuG chatbot can resolve a majority of help desk queries without human involvement by drawing from your organization’s knowledge bases. DevRev also uses Gen AI based automation to auto-populate customer data fields and reduce manual data entry.
2. Integration and collaboration features
Help desks and service desks need high-quality data to function effectively. The quality of data these tools receive depends on how well they integrate with data sources and collaborate with other organizational systems.
For example, DevRev’s IT support system uses snap-ins for easy integrations and facilitates collaboration between customer support, CRM, and product development systems. This prevents data silos and enables more efficient support.
3. Knowledge bases
A well-organized knowledge base is the backbone of effective support. It empowers your customers and your support team to find solutions quickly. Advanced help desk and service desk tools can help you create effective knowledge bases by drawing your attention to what customers are looking for. By addressing customer intent directly, you reduce wait times and drive customer satisfaction.
For example, DevRev’s support system creates repositories for all your information. It uses AI to analyze existing knowledge bases and pinpoint gaps. It then helps create new content with Gen AI assistance.
4. Analytics
Data analytics drives efficient support operations. Powerful data analytics can help you configure your support systems to meet customer demands. For this, look for tools that provide comprehensive reports, real-time dashboards, and trend analysis capabilities.
DevRev converges data from various sources to deliver personalized, actionable insights. It increases user observability, helping you identify recurring issues and resolve them quickly.
The bottom line
A cloud-based IT support solution with advanced automation, easy integrations, knowledge bases, and high-performance analytics can redefine your entire support ecosystem, create better customer experiences, and improve satisfaction.
DevRev is an AI-native support platform that brings you the tools, flexibility, and scalability you need to create exceptional customer support experiences.
Powered by Turing AI, DevRev’s Support App offers advanced automation for lightning-fast responses and in-depth analytics of support queries and customer feedback for proactive problem identification. The Gen AI capabilities and cross-team data integrations promise well-rounded support and solutions.
Starting today, improve self-service with AI, find solutions quickly, and escalate issues without hiccups. Try DevRev today to learn how you can enhance customer satisfaction like never before!
