The discussion about help desk vs. service desk can be confusing. Except for subject matter experts, these two organizational resources remain a mind-bender for typical industry users. That’s why someone’s help desk is others’ service desk.

In one or more than two instances, the help desk and service desk traits may look interchangeable or similar. This outlook remained unchanged until 2007.

However, the introduction of ITIL v3 in 2007 and then its updates in 2011 completely the existing notion of help desk and service desk.

Although the end goal of both frameworks is the same, which is to ensure end users’ experience, the fundamental concepts are distinctive.

In this blog, let us break down the vague concept of a help desk and service desk.

A helpdesk is a single point of contact (SPOC) for users who need immediate help resolving IT-related issues. It is built on a break-fix model that facilitates real-time resolutions for product or service issues, IT requests, or queries.

The primary goal of a help desk is to provide incident management support and encourage zero downtime.

As its goal is to improve IT response, the helpdesk primarily encompasses a smaller part of ITSM rather than a whole aspect of the ITSM principle.

For example, if a customer faces loading issues with her laptop, a helpdesk can guide the user to fix the system with immediate assistance or resources.

A service desk focuses on implementing ITSM best practices to facilitate continuous service delivery or service requests and incident management for customers, users, and stakeholders.

From this viewpoint, a service desk is a single point of contact between customers and service providers, enabling seamless communications and collaborations and facilitating service requests and incident management.

Since a service desk follows the best practices of ITSM or ITIL infrastructure, its core ideology is to ensure overall business efficiency regarding incident, change, and problem management.

Note:A service desk is a core part of ITSM, whereas a help desk is a subset of a service desk focused on incident management only for users.

A straightforward answer to decipher the difference between a help desk and a service desk is that the former delivers help for IT support, and the latter ensures service delivery for IT support and service requests. So, a service desk is an additional capability extended from a helpdesk to satisfy more mature business objectives.

Helpdesk vs. service desk - objective

A helpdesk prioritizes user experience by resolving IT or service issues in real-time. On the other hand, a service desk implements an ITIL strategy to improve incident management and other areas and meet long-term business goals.

Helpdesk vs. service desk - IT approach

A helpdesk focuses on IT-centric tasks and primarily handles IT-related tickets, whereas a service desk handles IT and non-IT tasks.

For example, a helpdesk can help solve password reset problems. If a new hire seeks a new device, a service desk manages these service requests and oversees a faulty laptop.

Helpdesk vs service desk - response behavior

A helpdesk is reactive, responding in real time when a requester raises a ticket. It only focuses on service restoration to normalcy that occurs in everyday IT operations.

An IT service desk harnesses proactive response. By keeping its infrastructure well-maintained and ahead of time, it improves real-time response and ensures future service continuation.

Helpdesk vs. service desk - target audience

A helpdesk provides help for customers and internal employees on IT-centric services. On the other hand, a service desk ensures that IT service delivery meets the objectives of customers, IT teams, and stakeholders.

Helpdesk vs. service desk - resolution model

A helpdesk is a standalone solution built on a break-fix model. So, as and when IT issues or service issues arise, the help desk team is ready to solve them and handle other issues.

On the other hand, a service desk is an integrated model that improves IT service delivery across asset management, incident management, change management, and problem management.

In most cases, the use cases are more or less the same across the service desk and help desk. There are some significant usages worth knowing.

What does an IT service desk do?

Simply put, a service desk helps manage IT service delivery for internal and external users and helps stakeholders maintain SLAs and other core business aspects.

Here are a few essential service desk functionalities:

• Single point of contact for end-users -all administrative related queries, including customer service and IT requests, go to the service desk

• Multi-disciplinary ITSM task management -a service desk enables a CIO or IT leader to manage all aspects of ITSM rather than just only incident management

• Solves IT issues (monitoring networking or troubleshooting of an application)

• Helps with service requests (provisioning of a new laptop)

• Facilitates new employee onboarding (arranging first day assets and resources for a new hire)

• Picks up customer service, tracks history, and resolve issues

Benefits of a service desk:

• Unify everyone on the same platform -all across the business processes, IT people, external customers, and processes, including the stakeholders, get information from a service desk

• Self-service functionality for everyone -it is easy for everyone to find an answer to most common issues through a self-service portal inside a service desk

• Knowledge base or FAQ-based help centers offer great resources

• Ticket escalation is easy when issues or services are tough to manage

• Fully integrated with ITSM or ITIL practice -a service desk offers integrated incident and service request management

• Incident management

• Change management

• Problem management

• IT asset management

• Workflow automation

• SLA management

If it is an IT incident, a service desk offers instant help to minimize its impact and restores the operations in no time.

On the other hand, following the ITSM rule, a service desk ensures the same incident does not recur by leveraging predictive analytics capability or predictive maintenance. So, comprehensive monitoring keeps IT leaders ahead of downtime, ensuring IT assets always perform at top capacity. This could be an excellent example of a future-proof IT incident management drive.

Another core area of the service desk is change management and problem management

Change management facilitates change across the organization so everyone can access resources when needed without facing any downtime, such as when a software license expires. Also, if a new work process is adopted, change management ensures everyone follows it and is on the same page.

Problem management detects the root cause of an unknown IT incident so that it does not disrupt future operations.

What does an IT help desk do?

Unlike a service desk, an IT help desk facilitates the resolution of IT incidents and addresses user problems.

Here are a few essential help desk functionalities:

• Single point of contact for customers -external and internal can get in touch with the help desk to take care of incidents

• Self-service or agent help -customers or users can get DIY help or ask for agent help

• Ticket lifecycle management -From initiation to closure, a ticket gets complete visibility for lifecycle management

• SLA management -a help desk complies with workplace governance by fulfilling users’ requests in real time

Benefits of a help desk:

• Straightforward communications -一 no more email strings and miscommunications could disrupt or delay responses

• Requests addressed by an agent

• Self-help through a knowledge base or FAQ-based resources improves user experience

• Timely assistance as per priority 一Help desks remove the need to create reminders in emails and instead enable you to queue tickets as per priority

• Analytics and reporting 一Get views into the number of tickets, agent involvement, and another case history to develop a knowledge base so that you can prevent agent’s utilization in repetitive tasks

• Automation and task completion 一Manage workflow automation to replace repetitive tasks and free agents to focus on critical tasks

• Customer experience 一Workflow automation resolves issues at scale, whereas knowledge bases and FAQs can help sort out issues steadily

Let’s know that a help desk offers help for an immediate IT-centric issue, whereas a service desk offers overall ITSM functionalities. Regardless of what you need based on organizational expectations, there are some best practices to maximize your investment in a service desk or help desk.

They follow as below:

Identify your business goals -when your team is growing, and it is tough to manage every customer single-handedly or IT request, evaluate certain areas that need your attention. Discuss with the IT team, discover the most common areas of workflows, and streamline them.

Work through features -not all vendor offers similar products. Each product has different functionality and comes with a variety of features. Know what features are needed

• A unified dashboard to pull up data from other apps

• Integration capabilities

• Automation customization for workflow management

• Templates for conversation design

• Automated alerts

• Analytics and reporting

• Change management

• Downloadable template formats such as CSV file, Excel, and PDF

• Agent handover, Etc.

Note:Ensure your service desk or help desk platform offers scalability as you grow. Additional features that come with scalability may involve additional fees. Before you zero in on one particular vendor, confirm the pricing structure.

Test and trial the product -every product offers a free trial. Before you go for a final settlement and repent later, you must test and trial the product. It lets you dive deep into the product’s capability and determine if it complements your business objectives. Examine if you can,

• Create your contacts

• Integrate other apps or software suites

• Create your workflows and escalate them

• Assign role-based access

• Take control over automation rules and logic, etc.

As you uncover the difference between a service desk and a helpdesk, your ideal platform becomes more apparent.

If you are a small or medium-sized business, you know your IT infrastructure is not as massive as an enterprise. You may shore up a help desk to support customer service issues. More often than not, you can meet IT support needs and customer requests - both from a single help desk dashboard.

There is no match for a service desk when you aim at organized-wide process efficiency and operational resilience. It is a long-term mission-critical business tool to help with IT-centricity and service requests. If your focus is to expedite customer experience, increase the productivity and efficiency of an IT team, and finally see your business scale and grow steadily, a service desk fulfills your expectations.

Choose the right tool for your employee support by choosing a help desk or service desk. Workativ's GenAI-powered help desk or service desk helps you build a better employee support experience. Schedule a demo today.

1. Why can I not use a help desk to manage service desk-level capabilities?

If you evaluate a helpdesk vs a service desk, there is a striking difference between the former and the latter regarding the ITSM ecosystem. It means when you want to achieve an organization-wide process efficiency for service request management, change management, and problem management, a help desk will fall short of a service desk capability.

2. Which is a more comprehensive IT support solution 一 an IT help desk or an IT service desk?

A service desk allows you to comprehensively resolve IT support issues with extended flexibility to monitor and detect future anomalies using predictive analytics. It is easy to prevent the incident from occurring and allocate resources to fix the issue in advance before it could come up and disrupt the IT operations.

3. Does a help desk offer workflow automation?

In this digital age, automation is standard for IT help desk tools. Applying your business rules and logic allows you to streamline end-user communications to manage IT issues with app workflow automation.

4. Which is a better option between a service desk and a help desk in improving user experience?

Both tools feature automation capability. So they are always better for specific use cases.

To gain more speed and drive business values, leveraging a conversational AI chatbot that syncs with your business comms channels and fetches information directly to the communications channel always gives a competitive edge.