How To Create a Top Customer IT Service Desk

Customers are the lifeblood of any business—your business won’t exist without them. Keeping your customers satisfied, happy, and loyal is crucial to the success of your business. Technical glitches can cause customers frustration and lead to a poor customer experience. 

That’s why an IT service desk should be an integral part of your customer service strategy. A service desk provides technical assistance, resolves IT-related issues, and ensures that technical infrastructure operates smoothly. 

The terms help desk and service desk are often used interchangeably. While the two have similarities, it’s important to understand the difference. A service desk focuses more on technical support and IT-specific tasks rather than acting as a full-service customer service platform.

Key Considerations for Setting Up an IT Service Desk

When setting up a customer IT service desk, it’s important to get the fundamentals right. Here are the most important factors to consider when building your service desk.

1. Define the Objectives and Scope of Your Service Desk

As with any business undertaking, it’s essential to define the objectives and scope of your service desk from the outset. What kind of queries will it handle? And just as important, what won’t it handle? 

Clearly outlining the boundaries of your service desk helps prevent “mission creep” — the gradual expansion of responsibilities beyond the service desk’s original purpose.

Your service desk should focus on IT issues such as: 

• technical errors
• software malfunctions
• troubleshooting 
• network and server problems
• incident triage
• identifying and responding to security threats, such as data breaches, viruses, and malware

Your service desk should not address general customer support, such as account queries or complaints.

2. Institute a Service Level Agreement (SLA)

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a clear and defined framework on how you will manage the level of service that your service desk will provide to customers.

It sets out the following:

• performance expectations
• roles and responsibilities
• key performance indicators
• escalation process
• crisis management procedures

An SLA provides direction, maintains accountability and ensures you deliver consistent, high-quality service.

3. Implement Quality Service Desk Software

The best service desk software can automatically organize, route and manage IT queries so that your support team can respond to incidents quickly. The right service desk software will streamline workflows, boost efficiency, and ultimately reduce customer friction. 

When selecting software, look for features that meet today’s customer expectations. According to a study by NICE, customers want professional agents, self-service online, and the ability to access customer service using the digital channel of their choice.

With that in mind, here are some must-have service desk features:

• Self-service options
  As the NICE study highlights, many customers want to be able to solve problems on their own. Self-service options such as a knowledge base, frequently asked questions (FAQs) list, and troubleshooting guides help customers resolve issues independently. This also reduces the burden on your support team. 

• Multichannel functionality
  Customers expect to contact companies through various channels, including phone, email, live chat and social media. Your service desk software should support as many channels as possible to provide seamless customer experiences.

• Customer Portal
  Customer portals are an excellent way to centralize self-service support. It can serve as a hub where customers can submit tickets, check status updates, and communicate with support agents.

4. Hire Expert Staff

The success of your service desk doesn’t rest solely on software—it also requires a top support team. 

Your service desk staff should possess a wide range of IT knowledge and specialized expertise. Members of your team should be qualified in IT networking and infrastructure, software, troubleshooting and enterprise resource management (ERP) systems.

Experienced and skilled can resolve issues without the need for escalations, resulting in faster incident resolution and higher levels of customer satisfaction.

5. Train Your Team

While technical skills are vital to the success of an IT service desk, soft skills are just as important. Effective communication, active listening, and empathy are crucial for interacting with customers, particularly when they’re frustrated or irate.

Your team should be trained to de-escalate angry customers, remain courteous and professional, and offer reassurance to customers. Role-playing exercises, regular feedback, and ongoing training programs can help your staff develop the interpersonal skills needed to complement their technical expertise.

6. Performance Tracking and Metrics

Your service desk must continuously improve to remain effective. To do this, you must track service desk metrics to identify strengths and weaknesses. Service desk software can measure and report on KPIs like query resolution time, ticket volumes, and first-contact resolution rates, providing valuable insights into your service desk performance.

However, metrics alone aren’t enough. Customer feedback is equally important. Provide opportunities for customers to share compliments and criticisms. 

One way is through snap surveys at the end of customer service interactions. Customers may highlight recurring pain points or provide suggestions for improvement.

Another way is by monitoring social media platforms. Customers often share opinions about businesses online, making this a valuable source of unfiltered insights into their experiences with your company.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in IT Service Desk Software

We can’t talk about service desks without discussing artificial intelligence (AI). The integration of AI into service desk software has revolutionized the way businesses provide technical support. AI-enabled service desk systems operate more efficiently, handle large volumes of incidents more effectively, and streamline the workflow for service desk agents.

Here’s how AI can take your service desk to the next level.

AI-powered automation

AI automation significantly speeds up incident management. Robotic process automation (RBA) can automate processes such as creating service tickets, categorizing and tagging tickets, and assigning tickets to agents. By relieving IT agents from manually managing these tasks, it frees up their time to focus on more complex and strategic tasks.

Additionally, AI chatbots equipped with natural language processing (NLP) can interact with customers, answer common queries, and resolve simple issues without requiring human intervention. This means customers can have problems solved much faster and at any time of the day or night.

Predictive analytics and proactive support

Service desk software with predictive analytics can alert you to problems before they become critical. Analyzing historical data and trends can identify patterns within the data that signal impending problems, such as system failures or software bugs.

This allows for proactive rather than reactive support. The system can alert customers, employees or IT teams of potential issues and recommend preventive actions. Armed with this type of technology, your business may suffer less downtime and technical glitches that could frustrate customers.

Personalized customer experiences

AI can further enhance the customer experience by delivering personalized support. By analyzing customer profiles, past interactions, and preferences, AI-powered service desks can respond faster and more effectively address individual customers’ needs.

For example, an AI-driven service desk might recognize a returning customer and prioritize their request based on previously unresolved issues or the seriousness of an issue. Personalization fosters stronger customer relationships and can increase customer loyalty.

Enhanced knowledge management

A service desk’s knowledge base is a critical resource for both customers and support staff. 

AI can enhance knowledge management by dynamically organizing and updating the knowledge base. It can identify the most commonly asked questions, highlight outdated content, and help you create resource content with the assistance of generative AI. This ensures that your knowledge base remains accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date.  

In Conclusion

An IT service desk shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should be part and parcel of your customer service strategy. But you must be clear on the objectives of your service desk. For the best outcomes, get the fundamentals right, such as investing in the right service desk software and building a skilled IT support team. 

An IT service desk is more than just technical support—it’s a strategic asset that can drive long-term success for your business.

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 Deevra Norling is a content writer covering topics such as entrepreneurship, small business, career, customer service, digital marketing, e-commerce and finance.

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