Service Desk

When it comes to help desk vs. service desk, there are definite similarities. However, under the ITIL framework, the two are different. The first important distinction when considering the difference between help desk and service desk is its focus. The IT help desk is end-user focused. The IT service desk, on the other hand, is both end-user-focused and internally focused.

The help desk deals with individual user questions, issues, and problems under the purview of the service desk. The help desk works for ticket resolution. In other words, IT help desks are tactical because they’re in place to solve problems as they arise. The help desk troubleshoots or resolves the issue for the user then closes the ticket, thus ending their responsibility in the matter.

The service desk isn't just a renamed help desk, but rather acts as a point of contact for service requests, problem management, and configuration changes. The service desk is more focused on enabling business processes and providing integrated support for business impact with a focus on more formalized integrated business processes. The service desk also adapts to changing needs in the workplace and helps the help desk adapt, too.

Larger companies with lots of users and a complex IT infrastructure need both a help desk to address individual user issues and an all-encompassing service desk to oversee the lay of the land.

The IT service desk has an overarching goal of improving IT processes, monitoring and assessing current processes and trends, and looking for opportunities for IT processes to run more efficiently. The goal of the IT service desk is to restore the end user to productivity, using problem resolution, end-user education, or sometimes generating a workaround. To do this optimally, it has to understand the end-user experience and meet the end user where they are technologically.

The IT service desk is responsible for tracking tickets and identifying recurring issues and problems that need to be resolved once and for all. And, by keeping services up to date with current technologies, the service desk assures services work properly.

As the service desk becomes more integrated with overall business practices, service desk software has had to learn to integrate nicely with other software used throughout the enterprise.

In any business, there are many different types of service desk requests, each of which must be handled in a specific way.  Employees can’t spend time refreshing email and waiting for a response to a service desk ticket critical to their business productivity.

It’s important to source every ticket or incident to an origin, including the portal, chat, email, API call, or manual entry by a technician. With SolarWinds Service Desk, you have one place to streamline and organize the tickets and requests coming in through different mediums, including email, phone calls, a customized Service Portal, and even the occasional (or extremely frequent) walk up.

Sometimes the service desk (or service desk software) notes several incidents of the same nature in different departments that keep repeating despite troubleshooting. IT logs problems, categorizes them, and prioritizes them. They investigate and diagnose and develop a workaround. Service desk software should provide a robust ticketing system, with automation in place to speed up the identification, logging, categorization, prioritization, and diagnosis of problems.

Problems are IT's long-term pains and “hard-to-diagnose” challenges. They can be long-term conundrums without clear answers, and sometimes, no one is 100 percent sure who's in charge of fixing them. Good problem management, however, prevents many incidents, and a service desk software should equip you to address both.

SolarWinds Service Desk can help you follow ITIL best practices with escalation of incidents built in to the service desk, so a ticket can quickly move to a potential problem or be associated to an upcoming change or release.

Many departments may have their own internal processes, how-to documentation, and other resources, but these can be difficult to manage and difficult for employees to access if not centralized in a single platform. Streamline ticket routing by building the rules in your SolarWinds Service Desk to get tickets and requests to the right individuals and teams quickly. This removes ticket routing bottlenecks, resolving tickets and requests faster.

Maybe your organization has different incident management protocols based on the category (or department) the ticket originates. Route tickets by categories such as application support, hardware support, HR or benefits, or facility requests to make sure your ticket isn’t spending time going through the wrong channels. Get it to where it needs to be immediately.

Automated routing, ticket escalations, status updates, workflows, approval notifications, and SLA breach protocols have proven valuable in IT. If there’s any scenario where “if a, then b” should always be true, you can create a ticket automation rule to get the ticket into the right hands for efficient and fast support.

The knowledge base helps cut down time wasted on repetitive tickets, which is a huge benefit to service providers. Whether it’s a password reset, a change to a 401(k) contribution, or a request to book a conference room, your organization can create a knowledge database within your service desk to answer questions. When repeat questions come in, there’s no need to retype the solution over and over again; just point, click, and send a solutions article. When an article needs an update, you can grant service providers the ability to submit changes for approval.

Fully customize your SolarWinds Service Desk knowledge base with step-by-step articles and tutorials, including images, videos, and links. This smart tech can empower both your employees to resolve tickets on their own or give your IT pros quick articles to send out at the click of a button.

Give your employees complete transparency into the status of their tickets and requests. Through the SolarWinds Service Desk employee service portal (or email), your employees can comment on tickets and participate in the resolution by completing approvals and tasks associated to their requests.

In today’s environment, IT asset management and service desk should live in a unified state. Employees and their assets are attached from the day they begin work at your organization, and the data from both can easily help connect you to their needs quickly. Practically every ticket or request involves a user and one of their devices. Often, the issue will involve an application, software, or tool. By attaching all this data in one solution, you can easily connect employees with self-service, better plan for changes, and deliver faster solutions.

By unifying service desk and IT asset management (ITAM) capabilities, your organization can take a more comprehensive approach to tracking technology investments to incorporate service and repair activities into each asset’s history. Fully integrated IT asset management capabilities allow you to capture over 200 data points and continually monitor your computer and server inventory within the SolarWinds Service Desk, and gain a consolidated view on what’s loaded on the devices, who owns them, and where they’re located.

SolarWinds Discovery integrates with Service Desk and gives IT pros a complete and accurate picture of their software and hardware infrastructure. These insights allow you to proactively address potential risks to IT services availability.