What Is The Difference Between Service Desk, Help Desk and Desktop Support?

Does your business have a service desk, help desk or desktop support service? Many small to medium sized businesses rely on their business technology to keep their operations running at peak efficiency. Whether it’s your customers or employees, everyone needs your company’s servers, applications and databases to be available as needed. When something goes wrong, however, customers and employees rely on an IT tech support system to fix the problem. 

So who should they call when things go wrong? With limited budgets, many small to medium sized businesses are short staffed and can’t afford an in-house IT department to troubleshoot technical issues. This is where a remote service desk, help desk or desktop support service becomes valuable, because these offshore services help to cut costs while still providing a top level service to your customers and employees. 

Once you realise that you need some type of support service, you might wonder which you need: a remote service desk, help desk or a desktop support service? Whilst Outsourced provides all three of these remote support services to companies in the Philippines, it’s often difficult to know which type of service suits your needs better, in fact it can be quite confusing! So let’s take a look at each of these support systems in turn, so you can make an informed decision for your business.

How can a remote help desk service help your business?

Basically, a remote help desk is the first point of contact for both employees and customers who need IT help. There are two ways to set up this type of support. Your first option is to set it up so that the help desk simply triages problems and refers each caller to the appropriate department. Your second option is that the person manning the help desk can deal with basic problems, which if they become too complex are escalated to a specialist department. In essence, a help desk is focused on quickly resolving the needs of customers and employees, as well as minor technical issues and incidents.

How can a remote service desk help your business?

Whilst a remote help desk focuses on providing help to customers and employees, a remote service desk is focused on providing a smooth operating service. You might think that there’s not much difference between these two support systems and in some businesses, they do blend into one, but there is a practical difference between these two services. So a service desk tends to take a broader view than the help desk that is focused on resolving an employee or customer’s needs. This means that they look at the wider business needs of the company with a focus on improving IT and business processes across the company. They also respond to requests from the help desk to deal with more complex customer or employee IT problems.

How can a remote desktop support service help your business?

Remote desktop support on the other hand focuses on resolving software related issues on both customer and employee computers, as well as issues with the company’s printers, phones and network. It’s a more customer orientated service than the help desk or service desk and is becoming more popular in the Philippines, as companies realise the savings that can be made by using this type of strategy. 

For more information on hiring a remote service desk, help desk or desktop support service for your company, contact Outsourced today.