Can the two words be used interchangeably? Do you need both or can you manage with one of these?
In today’s day and age, the definition of service desk and help desk is left to one’s own interpretation. The reason? How you define them varies according to the size of your organization, the maturity of your processes, and the needs of your business (and customers). We will try and get to the various aspects of help desks and service desks with definitions, differences, and some examples.
Help Desk Vs Service Desk
A lot of IT specialists, analysts and our own customers argue that there’s no significant difference between the service desk and help desk. To differentiate the two, it’s very important to look at where they originated and how they were defined back then
1 Helpdesk as we knew it then was designed to focus more on fixes and troubleshooting IT issues. The focus was on the IT teams and NOT the end user. Since the primary goal was to help IT teams (and not end users) there was no cap on timelines (Read: SLA), and nothing to govern priority or urgency.
2 According to the ITIL glossary that came out in 2011 – A service desk is “The single point of contact between the service provider and users. A typical service desk manages incidents and service requests and also handles communication with the users”.
Simply put, a help desk is a subset of a service desk.
Here are a few more use cases and explanations to help us understand this better.
1 A service desk was born out of the need to provide an IT service to end users (as pointed out by ITSM glossary). A help desk is a subset of a service desk with a focus on solving/easing tasks for IT teams.
2 Help desks are designed for solving ‘incidents’ (or immediate/infrequent fixes), whereas a service desk is focussed on service requests (laptops, new employee recruiting etc.), self-help articles (How do I set up my scanner?), and other communication channels (chat, phone, email, walk-in) between IT teams and end-users.
3 Building on what was said previously, a help desk is centered around the existing needs of the IT team, whereas a service desk is built for what ITIL defines as the “Service lifecycle” consisting of 28 processes.
Therefore, the Service desk is like a blanket which covers everything related to communication and service between IT teams and end user and, the help desk is a subset of a service desk with a focus just on incident management. Hence, The service desk and help desk cannot be used interchangeably!
eStomi Professionals offer multiple ITSM services pertaining to the Service desk and various others, Helpdesk is one of the major subsets that contributes to the service desk. We have a marked experience in dealing with major help desk issues.
For more information on service details, contact
Connect@eStomi.net
Call: +91 9740922224
