What Is a Service Desk? A Complete Guide for Enterprises

It can get frustrating when your top enterprise clients get slow responses!

With managers and agents failing to take ownership across different channels, the answer is simple. An AI-powered IT service desk that has instant, accurate support every time, and makes sure ALL clients are helped on time. 

Want your agents to move towards high-value work? Well, here’s why service desk software can be invaluable.

What Is a Service Desk?

Service desks involve the strategic application of technology to automate repetitive tasks, standardize IT support processes, and boost operational effectiveness in solving customer or employee issues.

Older IT service desks rely on bigger teams. But the newer AI systems use programs, AI, and other tools. These handle usual requests, sending trickier issues to higher-ups, and give users ways to solve some problems on their own.

The truth is, US companies lose $62 billion USD each year because of bad customer support. The best service reduces this significantly.

Why a Service Desk Is Important for a Company

Automating an IT service desk requires a systematic approach that carefully considers the various facets of IT support operations. The following key steps outline a successful automation strategy:

1. Identify Repetitive Tasks: The first thing to do is find the regular jobs that take up a lot of the IT team's time. Usual examples are password resets, setting up in new computer programs, assigning help tickets to the right person, and simple problem-solving tasks.
   
2. Set Up Self-Service Portals: Making easy-to-use self-help web pages lets people solve usual problems on their own. These pages can have help guides with common questions and answers (FAQs), automatic ways to reset passwords, and easy ways to send in help requests and see how they are going.
   
3. Automatic Ticket Routing and Assignment: Making it automatic to give help tickets to the best IT person using things like special words, problem type, or how urgent it is, makes sure that requests get quick help from the right skilled people.
   
4. Use Workflow Automation Tools: Using tools that make work steps automatic makes important jobs smoother, like handling problems, managing changes, and dealing with big issues. This means sending automatic alerts, moving up serious issues, and getting approvals done automatically.
   
5. Connect with Other Systems: Easy linking of the service desk with other important IT tools, like tools that watch systems, lists of equipment, and ways to talk, makes automatic tasks work even better. It also shows everything that’s happening with IT.
   
6. Apply AI and Machine Learning: Tools with AI can make harder jobs automatic. This includes guessing how many help tickets will come, finding problems that happen over and over, and giving smart tips to IT support agents.
   
7. Check and Constantly Improve: Automation isn't a one-time job. It needs constant watching and improving. It's key to regularly look at automatic steps, listen to user thoughts, and make small changes. This keeps it working well and fitting the company's changing needs.

What Can a Service Desk Do for Your Business?

The fact is that IT service desks are most often the first point of contact for customers for issue resolution or any clarification. Service desks benefit companies, and here’s how it can contribute to your business:

1. Works Faster: Making work steps better, doing less work by hand, and solving help requests faster really help IT support work better.
2. Lowered Expenses: Making repeat jobs automatic means fewer IT workers are needed for those tasks, and it lowers day-to-day running costs.
3. Happier Users and Better Service: Quicker replies, easy ways for people to help themselves, and telling people things before they ask all make users happier with IT help.
4. Easier to Grow: Automation helps IT support grow smoothly to handle more work as the company gets bigger. This can be done without needing a lot more money or people.
5. Automatic Password Resets: Letting people reset passwords themselves using self-help pages greatly lessens the work for IT helpers and makes users much happier.
6. Ticket Classification and Routing: Automatically sorting and sending help tickets using special words, problem type, or how quickly it needs fixing makes sure requests get to the right IT person quickly.
7. Automatic Replies and Updates: Having automatic replies that say a help ticket was received and give news on how the fix is going helps people know what's happening. These automatic messages can also tell IT helpers about very important problems or things that need faster help
8. Change Management Automation: Making the steps for big IT changes automatic (like getting permissions, sending news, and planning times) means fewer problems when IT services are updated. It also gives better command over these changes.
9. Automatic Surveys and Feedback: Automatically asking people for their thoughts using surveys sent after a problem is fixed gives useful ideas. These ideas can then be used to make the service better.

Help Desk vs Service Desk: Breaking Down the Key Differences

1. Functionality and Objectives

When you look at what it does, a Help Desk is mainly about fixing single problems – its job is to fix things that break right now.Its main goal is to quickly get things working again for one person who has a problem. 

A Service Desk, though, is part of a bigger plan. It includes many more types of IT help jobs that match what the whole company wants to achieve.

• A Help Desk is set up to quickly fix lots of common problems. It's like a very good team that quickly puts out fires.
  
• An IT Service Desk combines jobs like finding causes of problems, managing big IT changes, and handling requests for new services. It looks at how well all IT services are working and being provided.

2. Processes It Carries Out

The daily tasks are where you really see how the two types are different. A Help Desk is set up to quickly handle problems as they come up. This means finding, understanding, and fixing single issues using set ways of doing things.

A Service Desk includes these tasks, too, but it adds more detailed work steps. These steps look after a service from start to finish and always try to make things better.

• Help Desk jobs are all about finding and fixing problems fast using clear steps. They often use a good list of answers for common fixes.
• IT Service Desk tasks include finding the main reason for problems that keep happening, handling planned IT updates, and giving people new services or tools they ask for, all through set ways of doing things.
  

3. Who Is It Better Suited For

Picking a Help Desk or a Service Desk, or changing from one to the other, really depends on the company's size, how complicated things are, and how advanced its IT is.

A Help Desk is often enough for smaller businesses or those with simpler IT needs. It's mostly for fixing problems as they pop up. An IT Service Desk is very important for larger companies with more going on. These companies see IT as a key helper for their plans and need one main way to manage all their IT help.

• New small companies, like SaaS businesses, might find a Help Desk is good enough. It can help them handle early customer problems well, even if they don't have much money or staff.
  
• As a company grows bigger, what they sell becomes a very important part of how their customers work. Service Desk management can help a lot here. It helps with the harder job of handling many different kinds of service requests and checking ahead of time that services are working well.
  

4. Value From Customer Standpoint

What the customer thinks is helpful is something important for us to think about. While a Help Desk quickly gives real help by fixing a problem fast, a Service Desk management offers a bigger, more planned kind of help. This is about making sure services work well all the time, are easy to use, and making it easy to ask for and control IT services.

• Customers like a Help Desk because it answers fast. It fixes their big problems without much trouble. This right away helps them get more done and feel good in that moment.
  
• The good thing about service desk automation is the full help it grants in all the ways customers use IT services. This includes making it easier to start using new services, knowing their requests will be handled in a set way, and having fewer problems happen again because the team looks out for them ahead of time.
  

5 Top Service Desk Challenges Faced by Enterprises

1. Cost to Start: Getting automatic tools ready can cost a lot of money at the start, for computer programs, equipment, and teaching people how to use them.
   
2. People Not Liking Change: IT workers and other users may at first not like new ways of doing work. So, you need good plans to help them get used to it and start using the new ways.
   
3. Connection Complexity: Linking new automatic tools with the older IT or legacy systems can be hard to do from a tech side. This needs very careful planning and execution to make sure they work smoothly together.
   
4. Data Quality Issues: How well automatic systems work depends a lot on good, full information. If the information is bad, the automatic system won't help as much and can even make mistakes.
   
5. Over-Automating Tasks: If you try to make too many things automatic, it can make things stiff. Then it's hard to deal with cases when something unusual happens. This shows why it's important to have a mix of automatic tasks and people helping out.

5 Service Desk Best Practices For Improving Operations

To make sure that you get the most out of your service desk's benefits, making sure that you follow best practices can make a huge difference. We’ve listed the main ones below:

1. Start Small and Iterate: Begin by automating a select few key processes, gradually expanding automation as you gain experience, refine your approach, and build confidence in the system's effectiveness.
2. Involve Stakeholders: Actively involve IT staff, users, and other relevant stakeholders throughout the planning and deployment phases to gather valuable feedback, address concerns proactively, and foster a sense of ownership.
   
3. Prioritize User Experience: Design user-friendly self-service portals and make certain automated processes are intuitive and easy to navigate, maximizing user adoption and satisfaction.
   
4. Invest in Training: Supply in-depth learning to both IT staff and end-users on how to use the automation tools and adapt to the new processes. Proper learning is key for a smooth transition and maximizing the benefits of automation.
   
5. Monitor and Measure Performance: Establish sound monitoring tools to track the performance of automated processes and consistently measure key metrics. This allows you to spot areas for improvement and demonstrate the value of automation.

Service Desk Trends You Should Know in 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing IT service desk automation, allowing more advanced and efficient IT support operations. AI-powered tools automate complex tasks, yield important perspectives, and improve overall user experiences.

• Intelligent Ticket Routing: AI algorithms analyze ticket descriptions, user history, and agent skills to automatically route tickets to the most appropriate IT agent, decreasing wait times and improving resolution times.
  
• Predictive Analytics: AI analyzes historical data to predict ticket volume, identify potential service disruptions, and proactively allocate resources, allowing IT to foresee and prevent issues.
  
• Virtual Agents and Chatbots: AI-powered virtual agents and chatbots give immediate assistance to users, answering frequently asked questions, guiding them through self-service options, and resolving simple issues autonomously, lessening the demands on human agents.
  
• Knowledge Base Optimization: AI analyzes user queries, search patterns, and feedback to optimize the knowledge base content, confirming it stays pertinent, up-to-date, and easy to find, empowering users to resolve issues independently.
  
• Sentiment Analysis: AI algorithms analyze user feedback, ticket interactions, and social media posts to identify user sentiment and proactively address potential issues or negative trends, improving user satisfaction.
  
• Automated Problem Resolution: AI can assist IT agents in diagnosing and resolving complex technical problems by giving smart suggestions, suggesting relevant knowledge articles, and automating troubleshooting steps.

3 Best Service Desk Software to Improve Operations

1. Thunai

Thunai’s customer support agent is one of the best IT service desk software when it comes to customizing AI Agent responses based on your knowledge base, as well as CRM automation, voice agents, email agents, meeting agents, and chat agents.

With Voice agents that attend calls and respond to customer queries, you get 24/7 customer support at a fraction of the the cost.

It also comes with automated call scoring that helps automatically QA all customer service calls with accuracy, and call transcripts are added to your system to help agents later on or to help automate follow-ups.

Thunai also works with a wide range of tools and can be paired with your Google Workspace. Although relatively new to the market, Thunai allows for call scoring, making it a useful tool for businesses looking to scale customer support as well.

Key Features of Thunai

• Thunai Brain (Centralized Knowledge Hub): Can take and process information from diverse sources (documents, videos, etc.) to build a company-specific knowledge base. Improve customer support by granting your team technical expertise at their fingertips.
• AI Communication Agents: Thunai allows you to use AI-powered chatbots and voice agents to handle queries and workflows. This can be through a website chat widget that grants real-time answers or even an AI voice agent that responds to verbal enquiries over support calls.
• Integration Capabilities: Information suggests integration with CRMs, Google Workspace, and the ability to work with various tools, which is important for connecting with existing support ecosystems.
• Customer Support Automation: Connects with applications like Gmail and CRM systems to automate tasks such as responding to customer queries automatically via email and chat.
• Personalized Email Agents: Thunai can generate emails for customers based on your call history, similar past technical issues, or existing customer issues, both manually using an extension or automatically based on a premise you set.‍
• Multilingual Support: Capable of understanding and responding in 50+ regional languages.

2. Zendesk

Zendesk has become a staple software for many customer success teams looking to manage customer interactions and support better. Now one of the best IT service desk software for teams to work with, Zendesk is renowned for its reliability and the multi-channel support it facilitates.

Zendesk has evolved with the times, with automation of repetitive tasks with triggers and even added AI functionality to its features. For customer service teams looking to improve their overall CSAT but in a cost-effective manner, Zendesk more popular service desk software to work with.

Key Features of Zendesk

• CRM Capabilities: Beyond just ticketing, Zendesk has expanded its functionality to include CRM features, allowing businesses to maintain customer profiles, track interaction history.
• Ticketing System: Converts customer requests into trackable tickets, allowing for categorization, prioritization, and assignment.
• Automation and Workflows: Zendesk allows for the automation of repetitive tasks through triggers and macros. This includes automatic ticket routing, sending reminders, and providing pre-written responses for common issues.
• Self-Service Options: To help customers and reduce agent workload, Zendesk supports the creation of comprehensive self-service resources. This includes building a searchable knowledge base with articles, FAQs, and guides

3. Jira Service Management

When it comes to managing incoming requests from various channels, Jira is one of the best IT service desk software tools to work with. This versatile tool, created by Atlassian, has for some time now been a popular solution for solving and keeping track of service requests.

This AI service desk software operates primarily through chat interfaces. However, Jira Service Management also comes with self-service and knowledge base enablement tools, helping customers navigate simple issues themselves.

This helps you utilize support resources better for the requests that need more attention or need to be prioritized based on the client.

Key Features of JSM Virtual Agent

• Problem Management: Teams can group related incidents to identify underlying problems, perform root cause analysis, and document workarounds to prevent recurrences.
• Automated Request Handling: Engages with users via chat to understand their requests and grant help for common issues.
• Information Gathering and Ticket Creation: Can collect necessary details from the user and automatically create a JSM ticket if unable to resolve the issue.
• Reporting and Analytics: The platform provides built-in reporting and dashboards to monitor key service desk metrics like response times, resolution times, and customer satisfaction. Custom reports can also be created using Jira Query Language (JQL).
  

Why Work With Thunai as Your Service Desk Software

Wasting resources on outdated systems is a HUGE mistake - that most enterprises fail to catch. With an AI-powered service desk software, you can improve your customer experience and handle a higher volume of customer issues a lot quicker and easier.

With Thunai, you can scale customer service with the use of voice agents that listen and respond to users in 50+ native and regional languages. Plus, this puts 24 x 7 customer support in place, helping build your customer trust and brand loyalty.

Want to see how voice agents and service desk features work? Why not try Thunai for free (no credit card information needed)!

FAQs about IT Service Desks

What is the role of a service desk?

The service desk acts as the single point of contact between users and service providers. It manages incidents, handles service requests, and provides support and information. Its goal is to ensure efficient service delivery and user satisfaction.

What is a service desk in BPO?

In BPO, a service desk is an outsourced function providing support services to a client's customers or employees. It handles inquiries, technical issues, and service requests on behalf of the client company. BPO service desks leverage the provider's resources and expertise.

What is an example of a service desk?

An example is an IT service desk within a large company where employees contact IT for technical issues. Another is a customer support service desk for a software company handling user queries and problems. These desks use software to manage and resolve requests efficiently.