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IT help desk: Full guide to definition, features, and benefits

Stay organised when technical issues arise with automated workflows, omnichannel support, and collaboration tools from the best IT help desk software.

IT help desk for top-tier professional tech support

Last updated December 16, 2024

Research from TalkTalk Business found that 23 per cent of UK SMEs faced technical failures over the past year, costing up to £10,000. That’s a lot for small businesses, and the numbers only get bigger the larger the company.

Fortunately, a fully functioning IT help desk can keep your business moving—but only if it’s actually saving your employees time and making their lives easier. That means no toggling between programs and no long searches for information.

Instead, your team needs a reliable and intuitive solution that has the features you need to get the benefits you want. Let’s cover the essentials of IT help desks and find out how they can improve your employee experience.

More in this guide:

What is an IT help desk?

An IT help desk is a software platform that helps businesses provide technical support to employees and customers. IT help desks are there to resolve issues quickly, maintain services, manage incidents, and fix issues that impact the business.

It’s easy to think that an IT help desk only deals with troubleshooting technical issues. While that’s definitely a key responsibility, they can actually handle all kinds of things, including:

  • Bug fixes in company software
  • General employee questions
  • Incident monitoring
  • New feature requests
  • Problems with networks or VPNs
  • Issues with login credentials
  • Device compatibility issues
  • Scheduled maintenance updates
  • Assisting with products or services

Beyond individual tasks, an IT help desk is a vital support system that makes sure users can be as productive as possible—whether that’s ensuring employees have access to a new system or helping customers with an upgrade.

How does an IT help desk work?

Infographic portraying how an IT help desk works.

An IT help desk is usually the first point of contact for employees and customers to get help with their IT issues. The process generally follows a few simple steps:

  1. Problem reported: an employee reaches out to the help desk using their preferred channel, e.g. phone, email, or live chat.
  2. Ticket created: the IT support software creates a help desk ticket for the issue that tracks the problem until it’s resolved.
  3. Issue diagnosed: an IT help desk technician reviews the ticket, asks questions if needed, and identifies the cause of the problem.
  4. Problem resolved: the technician fixes the issue, either remotely or by guiding the employee through steps to solve it themselves.
  5. Ticket closed: once the issue is resolved, the technician closes the ticket and the employee is notified that their problem has been solved.

Keep in mind that the process can differ depending on the question, issue, or incident. For example, some issues may have to be escalated to different departments or management levels, meaning more steps.

Collaboration features are essential.

Top tip: collaboration features are essential. Any IT help desk solution should allow your IT team to share information and work on multiple tickets at the same time because issues often require input from different departments.

IT help desk vs. other solutions: What’s the difference?

When you’re looking for IT support solutions, you might come across terms like ‘help desk’, ‘service desk’, and ‘IT service management’. While they may come under the same umbrella, there are some important differences. Let’s look at each in a little more detail:

  • IT help desk

An IT help desk is a reactive solution that provides technical support. It’s designed to handle basic troubleshooting tasks and resolve user-reported issues. Think of it as your go-to for quick fixes and immediate problem-solving.

A service desk is more comprehensive with extra features like self-service knowledge bases that allow users to resolve their own issues quickly. An ITSD not only provides support but also manages and coordinates the delivery of IT services.

  • IT service management (ITSM)

ITSM goes a step further, handling the end-to-end delivery of IT services, including problem, incident, asset, and service request management. Teams design, create, deliver, and support all things IT. Put simply, it provides IT as a service.

Benefits of IT help desk services

Investing in the best IT help desk services offers a lot of great benefits for almost any company. From improving efficiency to boosting employee satisfaction, an IT help desk can get your business where you want to go faster. Here are four of the key benefits of IT help desk support.

An infographic showing benefits of IT help desk services: data safety, enriched content, informed decisions, and productivity boost.

Keep personal employee data safe

It’s hard to understate the importance of data security in our digital landscapes. Nearly 40 per cent of businesses surveyed in the Zendesk EX Trends Report 2024 found it challenging to protect information in remote work environments. Fortunately, IT help desk solutions come with a range of security features to keep your data safe, including:

  • Permissions for multiple departments
  • Separate ticket access controls
  • Two-factor authentication
  • Advanced encryption

Create rich help centre content with the help of generative AI tools

Generative AI tools can analyse common issues and queries and produce tailored content that addresses specific problems. Not only does this mean you can create detailed documentation, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides in half the time, but it also reduces the workload on your teams whilst improving both consistency and accuracy. Going further, AI agents can even resolve queries without a human agent.

Empower leaders to make better decisions

IT help desks provide valuable insights into how your systems are performing and what issues your employees are facing on a daily basis. Monitoring support requests can help you identify knowledge gaps, training opportunities, and possible IT tweaks or changes. This data-driven approach makes it easy for leaders to make informed decisions, like where to allocate resources and which processes would benefit most from immediate improvements.

Boost employee productivity

The best IT help desks have centralised platforms that make it easy to resolve issues quickly, reduce downtime, and ultimately avoid frustration. Employees can solve their problems in just a few clicks, so there’s no need for long phone calls or lots of questions. With the right tools, like a help desk ticketing system, IT help desks also automate routine tasks, freeing up your teams to focus on more complex issues or going that extra mile.

IT help desk support features

IT help desks come in many different shapes and sizes—from single-person support teams to large, multi-tiered help desk services. Let’s cover four of the most important support features of almost any IT help desk:

Unified employee service data

An IT help desk brings all your employees' interactions, requests, and issues together in a single system. This gives you a complete view of each employee’s service history, making it easier to track recurring issues, understand individual needs, and provide personalised assistance. Unifying your employee service data is a great way to improve response times and help your teams deliver more consistent support.

AI-powered self-service

AI-powered customer service chatbots not only deflect common queries with answers to FAQs but also provide solutions to more complex issues by suggesting knowledge base content. This helps employees help themselves and takes some pressure off your teams. AI can also analyse and categorise tickets based on urgency, complexity, expertise, and more—helping improve response times and making sure tickets are allocated to the right people.

Omnichannel support

IT support help desks ensure connected and consistent customer interactions across channels by bringing everything into a single platform. Employees and customers can easily switch between channels and still receive the same level of support. On the other side of the screen, help desk teams can see full conversation history—ending siloed conversations and unifying all customer context into a single source of truth.

AI-powered insights

AI can analyse customer sentiment to help you better understand the hidden emotions behind customer feedback. Taking it a step further, predictive analytics can provide fresh insights into customer behaviour and help you predict their future actions, making your customers feel like the support process has been designed just for them. Plus, this forms the perfect basis for proactive customer service.

IT support help desk best practices

A well-oiled help desk keeps your business running smoothly and makes employees’ lives easier. Whether it’s fixing a problem or answering a question, there are some key best practices that can help keep everything on track.

Here are the top IT support help desk best practices.

Choose the right software

Find a ticketing system that not only makes it easy to track, manage, and organise employee requests but also allows your teams to communicate and collaborate seamlessly. Look for omnichannel capabilities and proven scalability.

Set clear standards

Decide on what services your team will provide and how they’ll deliver them. That means defining service level agreements (SLAs), ticketing processes, and communication guidelines so that everyone knows what’s expected.

Automate your workflows

Save time and free up your agents by using AI to help you assign, categorise, and prioritise tickets. It can also help you deflect tickets by providing answers to FAQs and recommending knowledge base articles without involving an agent.

Create a knowledge base

Develop an easily accessible knowledge base to help your teams and employees find the answers they need quickly. Make sure it’s user-friendly and up-to-date, and ask more experienced employees to write helpful articles and guides for others.

Monitor performance

Track and monitor important KPIs—like first response time and average resolution time—to ensure your team are meeting expectations. Try Zendesk Workforce Management to forecast staffing needs, schedule agents and monitor performance the easy way.

Listen to feedback

Send surveys to employees after you resolve their issues to measure satisfaction and improve your IT help desk services and processes. Try to spot potential patterns to understand what you’re doing well and where you can improve.

Focus on employee experience

Prioritise staff satisfaction over simply meeting KPIs. Use analytics to analyse data and trends to identify potential problems early on and draw actionable insights, e.g. customising the work environment or tech stack to better suit employees.

Invest in training

Provide ongoing training opportunities for your team to keep them fully up to date with new features and technologies. Encourage them to take courses, get certifications, and add new skills to help grow their expertise.

Hire the right people

Look for candidates who aren’t just technically capable but also passionate about helping others. They should be able to communicate clearly and show real empathy for other employees’ issues.

Develop a culture of helping

Encourage teamwork and support among team members, and celebrate any instances where employees go above and beyond to help users. Always aim to promote wellbeing and try to give them everything they need to succeed.

Customer story: Tesco

Supermarket supremo Tesco partnered with Zendesk to supercharge their employee experience and spruce up their IT help desk with AI-powered self-service. With over 330,000 employees, Tesco has plenty of people to keep in the loop, so they needed mobile-friendly IT support that was accessible, easy to use, and reliable.

Tesco went with the full Zendesk Suite Enterprise Plus and their employee self-service rate skyrocketed from 30 per cent to 73 per cent. That’s lots of empowered Tesco employees helping themselves to do their job better.

Frequently asked questions

Try Zendesk IT help desk software for free

Don’t let tech issues slow you down. Whether you're grappling with software glitches or hardware hiccups, Zendesk offers a simple, reliable, and intuitive IT help desk solution to help you enhance your employee and customer experience.

Built with employees in mind

Zendesk is made for the way your employees actually work. Intuitive and easy to navigate, it makes life easier for your teams to provide and receive support in a bright and modern interface they’ll embrace as their own.

Moves with your business

Zendesk is simple to use and works right out of the box, so you can start using it from day one. It also scales and flexes with IT best practices as your needs evolve. In other words, if your business grows, Zendesk grows with it.

Intelligent by design

Zendesk comes with loads of native features that make it easy to leverage AI and automation in internal support. Plus, the Zendesk Marketplace has tonnes of integrations to extend functionality and add advanced features.

There’s never been a better time to give Zendesk help desk software a whirl.

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