With the rise of internet technology, the world has shifted to a wide range of tools that are today, considered to be for granted. At the turn of the millennium, many different products came into existence and as years went by, they have evolved many times. What started as a simple bulletin board, is now a major search engine. And what started as a simple email system, is now a Swiss army knife of office tools. Indeed, we have virtual workstations, online office tools, cloud storages, and most importantly, service desk systems.
Yes, it is service desk tools that drive today's market to innovation. Service desk software is designed to push more ideas, more sales, more solutions. These tools are the main reason why many of the above-mentioned products came into existence in the first place. But as positive as they might sound, many question themselves, what does service desk do that make them so good? This is the question that we will try and answer today. Thus, without further ado, let’s get started!
What Is a Service Desk
Before we jump into the feature territory, we first need to understand what is the service desk. So, a service desk is a tool that is used to complete a wide selection of tasks that are usually related to the IT sector (but not necessarily). Essentially, a company would like to use a service desk tool to establish a primary point of engagement between the firm and the customers. And thanks to the included functionality (more on that in a bit) both small and large organizations can achieve this.
Also, depending on the type of service desk, companies can easily manage different brands, as well as set up an omnichannel system that will let them gather data. That data will also be processed by the service desk system. All in all, service desk tools aim to reduce workload and maximize output without extra expenses. This is what we believe is the most accurate service desk definition.
Additional Service Desk Features
Outside of what we mentioned previously, there are service desk tools that can provide extra features which are designed to solve other issues that aren’t exactly customer-related. The most common additional feature suite includes features that are designed to improve your internal operations, to improve your management operations, and initiate growth within a company. Let’s take a look at some of them individually.
Problem Management — One of the things that service desk systems excel is problem management. You see, in the IT Service Management sector, companies require a standardized solution to collaboration. All incoming issues should be isolated, analyzed, linked to similar problems, and easily viewable for future references. This is precisely what service desks allow you to do.
Release Management — When it comes to commerce, it is critical that you plan, test, and evaluate your upcoming products. You need to set a start and an end, as well as you, need to know what issues you might encounter. With service desks, managing your release phase is easier as you usually have a detailed roadmap, as well as an actual map of the industry, making your launch much more secure.
Change Management — IT sector is a dynamic environment and keeping up to date everyone can be a challenge. Thankfully, service desk systems allow you to announce upcoming changes to everyone in the organization. And it’s not just notifying your staff, with a service desk on board, you can implement these changes easier as your staff will not only be prepared for the issues at hand but will know how to react to things that aren’t expected.
Employee Management — But IT service desks aren’t just for managing your internal operations, with it, you can manage incoming requests from your staff. What this means is that you can keep track of their equipment, their burnout rate, their needs, and essentially, how they feel about certain things. This is a very critical part of the system as it allows you to understand what issues are currently at hand, as well as how you can solve them.
Reasons To Own A Service Desk
We understand that not every company needs a service desk and there are those that work in an industry where service desks are useless in terms of features. Yet, there are still benefits to leveraged. Here are some of the things as a service desk can improve!
Asset Control
One of the key reasons why you should own a service desk system is that most of them come with a feature called Configuration Management DataBase or CMDB for short. What it does is it allows you to track all your assets. Be it virtual or physical, you will know what item needs an upgrade or a software update, as well as what subscription service is about to expire. You can hook this system with the automation module so that you would know what, and when the certain item was updated.
Breed Innovation
It is no secret that service desk tools are great at ensuring that all processes are done according to the internal standards. But did you know that you can use it to push more unique ideas and meet customer demands more effectively? Indeed, service desk tools can automate a lot of mundane work and provide room for more substantial work that requires critical thinking. Service desks are great for such things as a lot of functions are employee-oriented and require little to no time to set up. All this means that you can breed innovation without sacrificing deadlines, or quality for that matter.
Power-Up Your Employees
To make work easier for your people, you can establish different knowledge bases that your agents can visit for consultation purposes. As well as you can set up different self-service portals in case you operate in a different time zone to that of your customers. Finally, you can aggregate all calls, messages, and emails in one place so that your agents don’t have to keep track of everything. Why clutter your people with work they don’t really like to do when everything can be done automatically, or not done at all.
You might find useful: Top Help Desk Software Solutions for IT Companies in 2019
Common Misconceptions About Service Desks
There are a few misconceptions surrounding the service desk industry. One such is that service desks work best if you work in a SaaS environment. To some degree this is true but many tools offer good substitute features that you can use practically in any industry. For instance, working in a SaaS environment, you can easily track how many service subscribers you have, you can do the same if you operate in commerce. All you have to do is configure the tool to track receipts the same account/person has done.
There are more but talking about them all would take forever. The key idea is that if you see a feature that you think is made for a SaaS-based company, chances are there is a version for another type of business model.
Bottom End
So that about wraps things up for our service desk definition. There are many more ways you can use a service desk. And depending on the vendor, you can even achieve greater results. These tools are primarily used by IT companies but it doesn’t mean that they won't work in other industries. In fact, it is often the exact opposite. But for now that’s all we’ve got, hope to see you soon!
