Service Desks: A customer assistance tool?
By Aditya Abeysinghe

Businesses today do not end their services by just making products available to customers. Pre-sales to Post-sales support and servicing is required for to enhance the bond between the customer and the seller. Customers often do not directly deal with sellers if sellers are medium or larger-scale service providers. Service desks link sellers with customers throughout the service delivery stages of businesses.

Usage

The main benefit of service desk is that they enable faster responses for customer questions. Customer service representatives in service desks and automated bots respond to queries from customers which helps customers to obtain support from a seller faster. Automated bots can also reduce costs involved in support as the costs for maintaining hardware for service desks, costs for customer service representatives and other costs are not included. Service desks can also help customers to obtain a service via phone or online messaging for some sellers who provide online services. This eliminates the requirement of a customer to visit a seller which reduces the time and effort of obtaining a service.

A Service desk is the layer between the customer and the seller of a service or product. Therefore, service desks allow a seller’s non-service desk related members to focus on other tasks such as new product or service design, strategic decision analysis, expanding customer stores, etc. Service desks control the data management between the seller and the customer such that the inner business is only involved in a customer issue only when required.

By using service desks, a business could also centralize all data related processes and enable easy data centralization. Data gathered from external parties such as customers or manufacturers and internal communications can be stored and analyzed to focus on which areas a business could enhance their sales and profits. Data gathered from a business’s internal communications can be used to improve business processes and reduce time in solving issues to efficiently produce products or services.

Why are service desks used?

The main capability of a service desk is its ability to monitor services and issues with customers as well as those with other teams in a business. A service desk can use both human and automated monitoring to identify issues in a business, store their status and constantly engage with people who are engaged with those issues to either solve them or suggest fixes to internal business to improve products and services. With monitoring, a service desk supports a business to reduce time and costs in improving business processes and products while strengthening seller-to-customer bond.

Monitoring with a service desk also involves notifying customers or other users of services on changes to products or service level disruptions. For example, a service desk can inform customers if a service provider has planned a service disruption for a few hours or has changed or stopped a service. For several types of services, service desks can provide customers similar services or could provide those services with their own input until the disruption has been solved or completed.

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