Help Desk

Helpdesk (or Support, Service desk, Support Center, Call Center) is a place providing help to the customers or users. They can contact the helpdesk by phone, e-mail, or through an specialised application or form. The helpdesk’s purpose is to provide help, advice, assistance or solve a problem. It can solve both problems and other troubles such as ack of knowledge or inexperience of users or customers. Helpdesk can also handle other things such as order status, receiving orders by phone, and so on.

It is a central contact point to help users or customers.

How does the helpdesk look like?

In small organizations, the helpdesk is simply one person available at a designated phone number or e-mail address and also communicates directly in this way. In this case, the helpdesk usually covers only normal working hours. (5x8)

Larger companies usually have larger teams that are both able to serve a larger number of people, cover a longer period of time (such as night hours or weekends, 5x16 or 7x24) and are also able to cover more knowledge and solve more situations. In such situations, helpd already needs some specialized software to help manage the requests (so-called tickets) between the user and the helpdesk staff. The Helpdesk software can also provide a knowledge base for already solved situations or can diagnose the situation (e.g. trouble in the network).

How do helpdesk processes work?

The situation of customers or users either solves the helpdesks directly and if they are unable to do so, helpdesk staff escalates it further to the experts or other technical support. There is several advantages of the helpdesk: at first users have single point of contact (with no need to search the right), at second helpdesk saves the time of specialists who solve only the more complicated situations and the simple ones (as “cable is out of outlet”) is solved by helpdesk workers.

The Helpdesk therefore provides contact between the user and the specialist and if the situation is solved by a specialist the helpdesk is usually remains the single point of contact and is the one who informs the user about the solution.