How to Run a Successful Service Desk

Customer care desk is an essential part of any business. Learn here how to run a successful service desk & the best practices for the process

By Claudio Pires
Updated on August 14, 2023
How to Run a Successful Service Desk

Help desk or customer care desk is an essential part of any business. A business uses a help desk to assist users or customers to get the best experience out of their products and services. It is, therefore, the responsibility of business managers to ensure the help desk is working perfectly and in line with the needs of customers. Learn how to run a successful service desk and the best practices for the process.

If the managers fail to implement help desks right, they are not likely to deliver results. That means there are strategies businesses can implement to ensure help desks are more effective and functional. Here we look at those strategies you can adopt to put your help desk on the right track.

What is a service desk?

First things first: let’s figure out what the help desk does. The ITIL 4 glossary defines a service desk as “the single point of contact between service providers and users.” A typical service desk manages service requests and incidents.

A service desk is a center where customers, such as employees or other stakeholders, can get help from their IT service providers. Regardless of the type of assistance provided, a help desk’s goal is promptly provide customers with quality service. Keep reading to learn how to run and the best service desk practices.

1 – Implement suitable help desk software 

There are many ways to go through help desk operations. You can use suitable help desk software to boost the user experience as a business. It is not easy implementing different protocols in your business if you don’t have a system in place. You can miss useful information from your team and customer inquiries without software in place.

Using software will minimize communication delays, minimize mistakes in feedback, and make other aspects of customer service easy to deliver. The software will reduce your time on repetitive takes so your team can focus on more essential tasks that improve your help desk performance.

Outsource your IT services if you run a sizable company. Integrating the help desk into your workflow is much easier once you get the right software to run a successful help desk.

2 – Automate the help desk process 

Take advantage of automation if you want to streamline and increase efficiency in service delivery. Incorporating automation in the help desk reduces the cost of running the help desk and lessens the reps’ workload. This means your reps will have more time to focus on building a relationship with customers.

The only concern in help desk automation is the loss of personalization. However, automation is more sophisticated and more intelligent. You can personalize the experience for each customer using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Your help desk can also use automation to track tickets and customers, ensuring efficiency.

3 – Build a customer portal to run a successful service desk

Creating a customer portal for your business should not be that hectic. Get a customer portal that provides a single help center for all customers by linking the IT service desk and other departmental services. With a working portal, your customers can all come to one platform to find all services they need.

With a customer portal, you improve speed and efficiency. Your employees can find the customer portal right on their browsers. You can also train new employees to find and use the customer portal to offer fast and quality services to every customer.

4 – Promote self-service in your business 

Most customers prefer using self-service support when making inquiries. It means you need a system where customers can serve themselves and get solutions to their inquiries. This way you speed up service delivery. For this to be true, you should have a system that is easy to use.  

Develop a self-service portal for your customers to find what they want in a few clicks. You can also add some FAQ pages on your website to address most of the common questions customers have about your products and services.

5 – Document and collaborate to run a successful service desk

With the right help desk application, your team can maintain detailed notes and keep track of all tickets to run a successful help desl. 

Collaboration is essential in offering customer support. It makes it easy for your team to handle similar instances when they reoccur. Your customer support team can share and access knowledge on managing customers so they can find ways to solve customer problems on time.

6 – Implement data analytics

As a business listening to your customer’s voices is essential. You can customize customer experience based on their needs. It depends on how you collect and use customer data.

You should implement reporting tools and business intelligence to translate customer feedback into functional insights. Coaching your teams on collecting, storing, and analyzing useful customer data is also vital. You should work towards improving the customer satisfaction rating.

Most customers will always talk more about a bad experience than a good experience. Therefore, you want to focus more on ‘bad’ data and address any serious help desk issues in your business before they are stretched beyond proportion.

7 – See the big picture and measure your progress

Like most IT organizations, we keep an eye on critical operational metrics. But we’ve moved away from being obsessed with random KPIs and are more focused on measuring what matters most. In conclusion, we put customer experience first and take the time to research the trends and numbers that can help us make the most significant improvements to run a successful service desk and the best practices for it.

We take the time to look at the peaks and troughs in the data, then ask the “why” to find the source of the “good” and “bad” customer experiences, as well as the low- and high-volume days of our teamwork. We focus on preventing accidents, not just solving problems. This is important to both the effectiveness and satisfaction of our Support Analysts. It also helps to report to management who value this business view.

As you might expect, our teams experience growing pains as they adapt to new challenges. Yours will too. You must have the right tools to measure your effectiveness and make the best decisions to lead your team.

Final Thoughts and best practices run a successful service desk

Running a successful help desk in your business should not be that difficult. You can choose collaboration, automation, self-service, and data analytics to make work easy for your team. Act on customer feedback on time, and don’t forget to build lasting customer relationships. 

With the right helpdesk strategy, you align your product roadmap to achieving your business vision for service delivery.

Claudio Pires

Claudio Pires is the co-founder of Visualmodo, a renowned company in web development and design. With over 15 years of experience, Claudio has honed his skills in content creation, web development support, and senior web designer. A trilingual expert fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, he brings a global perspective to his work. Beyond his professional endeavors, Claudio is an active YouTuber, sharing his insights and expertise with a broader audience. Based in Brazil, Claudio continues to push the boundaries of web design and digital content, making him a pivotal figure in the industry.

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