Gone are the days when IT support was seen as just a help desk handling simple break-fix issues. Today, IT teams manage everything from incident resolution to complex service requests and change management.
But even with modern solutions on the market, 43% of service desks still rely on outdated methods like email to track requests. Email alone might have been satisfactory in the bygone days of transactional IT, but as these teams drive increasingly larger business impact, this antiquated way of working leads to lost productivity, or worse, lost revenue.
The modern IT service desk is dynamic, proactive, and business-critical. Here’s what to look for in your next service desk solution, along with tested tips for streamlining your operations.
What is a service desk?
Service desk software allows organizations to efficiently manage internal or external service requests. They automate the processes of ticket generation, tracking, and resolution, allowing IT teams to address employees’ issues in a faster and more efficient way.
Top-performing IT teams put an emphasis on tools and infrastructure. And increasingly, they’re adopting advanced service desk solutions that offer features beyond basic ticketing capabilities, such as AI, workflow automation, and analytics. These features make it easy for teams to collaborate and share information— keeping everyone aligned and resulting in faster ticket resolution.
Service desk vs. help desk
While you might see the two terms used interchangeably, IT service desks and IT help desks serve different use cases in an organization.
A help desk is primarily reactive, focusing on resolving user issues as they occur.
A service desk, on the other hand, is both proactive and reactive, encompassing a broad range of IT service management (ITSM) activities aimed at enhancing overall IT service delivery.
For example, service desks handle incidents and service requests, but they also manage IT changes, ensure compliance with service level agreements (SLAs), and implement automated monitoring and alerting systems.
The anatomy of a modern, best-in-class service desk
A top-notch service desk solution handles a wide range of employee issues in the workplace, helping the IT team stay on top of them all. Here are a few core use cases:
Incident management: Handling employee urgent IT incidents, like a company-wide email outage or a laptop malfunction, for example, is one of the top use cases for a service desk. If IT teams can quickly address these incidents, they minimize work disruptions and keep business processes at the company running smoothly.
Service request management: Employees often have less-urgent service requests they need responses to fast, and service desks should be able to help IT teams organize and handle these with ease. For example, an employee might need Adobe Photoshop installed on her computer for upcoming graphic design tasks but she doesn’t have the software, so needs help with the installation and providing necessary licenses.
Problem management: While incident management focuses on identifying and eliminating the root cause of incidents, problem management focuses on restoring normal service operation as fast as possible. Say several employees in the engineering department have reported intermittent network connectivity issues — like slow internet speeds, disconnections from the company network, and difficulty accessing shared drives. Service desks can handle tickets like these and ensure the root cause of the problem is addressed.
Change management: Service desks can assist IT teams with change management by providing structured processes, communication, and oversight that help ensure changes are implemented with minimal disruption. They can handle the logging, tracking, and managing of change requests, evaluate the potential impact of a change on services, and coordinate the approval process for changes.
Relying on email alone to manage these varied and complex use cases lacks the structure, visibility, and efficiency needed for timely issue resolution — leaving IT teams and employees frustrated.
Why smart IT teams are choosing a modern service desk over email
A modern IT service desk should transform your IT operations to be more efficient, proactive, and user-centric. Once implemented, the benefits are often immediately noticeable:
Improved response times. One of the standout advantages of a modern service desk is its ability to drastically improve response team times, making IT teams instantly more productive. Incidents can be categorized and prioritized when they come in, so critical issues are escalated and the less time-sensitive tasks saved for later.
Boosted employee satisfaction. When employee requests are handled promptly, you foster a better relationship between your IT team and the rest of the organization. By incorporating self-service portals (e.g. knowledge base) and offering multiple channels of communication (e.g. chat, email, phone), users are more likely to have a positive experience every time they need support.
Operational efficiency. By automating routine tasks and optimizing workflows, your IT team can handle more requests with less effort. Workflow automation features can route tickets to the appropriate team members based on their expertise and current workload, for example, ensuring each request is handled by the best-suited individual.
Proactive problem management. Identifying and addressing potential issues before escalation prevents many problems from happening in the first place. A service desk can monitor system performance and identify patterns that indicate potential future issues. Regular maintenance tasks, such as software updates and hardware checks, can be scheduled proactively to prevent failures. This proactive approach results in more stability and reliability in the IT environment — leading to happier teammates who face fewer urgent IT issues in the long run.
The right service desk to optimize your IT operations
Ready to transform your IT team into a collaborative, well-oiled machine? Front’s service desk solution can be your secret weapon. Its features are designed to make working together simpler and more streamlined, making proactive and reactive IT requests easier to manage at scale.
Some of Front’s core capabilities include:
Centralizing all communication: Front excels at centralizing all IT communications in one place. With its omnichannel support, your team can manage emails, chats, and other communication channels seamlessly, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. This centralization of apps simplifies interactions and enhances collaboration across the board.
Automating the mundane, and weaving AI into your workflows: Front has advanced automation capabilities like Macros and Connectors to improve team efficiency. With macros, teams can perform several actions at once with the click of a button; the options for codifying business logic are endless: macros are completely customizable to your needs. With Connectors, teams can pull in third-party data, like arrival date, status, and service for a shipping order number, to provide contextual information to agents without app switching. Front has leveraged artificial intelligence with its AI Summarize and Compose features to help summarize and draft messages using AI, so you can respond to requests faster.
Making collaboration seamless: Shared inboxes and internal comments in Front keep your team on the same page. Plus, integrations with tools like Slack and CRMs ensure seamless workflows across your organization. Information silos can be kept at bay.
Tracking key metrics: Front provides pre-built report functionality and lets you create custom dashboards to track your service desk performance. These insights help you identify areas for improvement and keep your service desk running at peak efficiency.
A knowledge base builder for better self-service: Front users can build a knowledge base to create a path to self-service and help users find responses on their own time — giving IT teams time back in their days. Front’s knowledge base can be designed to suit your brand and is equipped with fast search. Plus, you can add live chat service directly to your help center in a few clicks.
Choosing the right service desk
A modern service desk differentiates well-oiled IT teams from those bogged down by disorganization and lots of requests slipping through the cracks. By implementing advanced features like centralized communication, automation, AI, and comprehensive analytics, businesses can transform service desk operations with improved response times, boosted user satisfaction, operational efficiency, and proactive problem management.
Ready to take your service desk to the next level? Explore Front’s solutions and book a demo today to see how it can help you optimize your IT operations.
Written by Logan Davis
Originally Published: 3 April 2024