Help desk vs. service desk: What's the difference?

What is a help desk?

A help desk is a general, structured concept designed to provide real-time assistance to a variety of constituents across a range of immediate issues -- think customer billing errors or refunds, user login failures, or system failures. A help desk typically consists of at least one human professional but may employ a team or even an entire department -- depending on the size and complexity of the organization.

The help desk uses various technical tools and resources to execute its function. This can include software to track help requests, a knowledge base to record and access notes and information, a database of customer records and an assortment of information related to the organization's specific infrastructure and systems.

Help-desk support can be traced back to the 1990s, when help relied on traditional phone calls and email exchanges. Help-desk operations evolved through the 2000s to embrace web-based platforms -- help portals, for example -- intended to assist the help-desk staff in organizing, prioritizing and offering users direct access to useful information, e.g., a knowledge base.

The 2010s witnessed a dramatic rise in cloud-based help-desk systems -- help as a service -- and the extensive use of automation to accelerate password resets and responses to other common issues. In the mid-2020s, help-desk platforms and teams depend on omnichannel workspaces designed to integrate many forms of contact, using automation to route issues to the appropriate experts, and a burgeoning use of AI to resolve many routine questions before the user ever speaks to a human expert.

A successful help desk exhibits five key traits, including the following:

• Careful organization in which support channels and team expertise are well-defined. This ensures calls for help are routed to the proper expert for the quickest resolution with the fewest mistakes.
• Well-considered workflows in which paths to resolution are defined and repetitive tasks can be handled with high degrees of automation.
• Key performance indicators established and implemented to oversee important help-desk metrics, including response time, resolution time, ticket backlog and customer experience feedback scores.
• Comprehensive and ongoing training in which help-desk staff are taught to handle tickets, participate in chats, manage notes, create and edit knowledge-base content and use automation tools.
• Performance goals are implemented and monitored. For example, agent activity and workload distribution are monitored to optimize staffing, improve training and enhance knowledge-base content.

What is a service desk?

A service desk is generally considered a broader umbrella concept that encompasses help-desk operations as part of the organization's support structure. A service desk is often associated with IT, providing a primary single point of contact (SPOC) between IT organizations and people being served. Where the help desk focuses on fixing issues, the service desk is focused on the broader matters of business services and service delivery.

IT service desks are a vital element of IT Service Management (ITSM) and defined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) as a best-practices framework for managing IT services. Service desks are typically responsible for varied ITSM activities -- such as service-request management, incident management, knowledge-base management, self-service portal operations, performance reporting, service-level-agreement (SLA) management and change management. For example, a service desk can often manage service requests, resolve service issues or outages and plan future service upgrades.

Considering the broader mandate involved, a service desk will typically employ numerous IT and customer contact professionals, some of whom may be assigned to a help desk. Service desks have evolved along many of the same historical lines found with help-desk systems, evolving from telephone and messaging to web-based tools and automation-centric platforms. Today, service desks routinely rely on chatbots, automation and similar AI-based mechanisms to prioritize, assign, manage and escalate tickets for faster resolution.

It's also worth noting that modern service desks have extended beyond IT to support HR, legal, finance and accounting tasks. For example, some service desks can manage employee onboarding, legal contracts and data management.

A successful service desk exhibits seven key traits, including the following:

• Comprehensive monitoring. Application health monitoring, for example, to oversee and report on service disruptions or outages.
• Rapid Identification and troubleshooting. Using tools to prioritize and automate solutions to well-understood problems.
• Change-management handling. Ensuring security, compliance and service performance, e.g., adherence to SLAs.
• Service-request handling. Including requests for new devices or data access, partner requests for data, software license management and renewals, and requests for more resources.
• Facilitation of self-service resources. Including knowledge bases and self-service tools to allow customers to resolve many routine issues quickly and independently.
• Knowledge sharing. Including team members, users and customers through a knowledge base and other educational resources such as videos and regular training opportunities.
• Use of KPIs and other metrics. Tracking the efficiency and effectiveness of the service desk.

Help desk vs. service desk: Differences and similarities

A help desk is intended to resolve specific issues -- often technical issues -- and provide those resolutions to users as quickly and effectively as possible. Help desks are mainly reactive resources that are focused on tactical incident management and resolution. Common examples of help-desk functions include resolving hardware problems or failures, addressing software defects or malfunctions and handling user questions or issues.

By comparison, a service desk is designed to consider the quality, performance and delivery of a wide range of business services. This can include incident management, requests for more or different services, and ensuring service delivery goals are met while maintaining security, compliance and service quality. A service desk handles ITSM and fits into the ITIL structure, and it can often be extended to support other non-IT tasks and services. A service desk monitors proactively, implements preventive actions and communicates changes or updates to users. A service desk may be responsible for a new software installation or the rollout of an entirely new IT project -- a private cloud, for example.

The following table compares the major differences and similarities between help desks and service desks:

Why both help desks and service desks are important

Small- and mid-sized businesses with limited IT or support needs can often meet those needs with a dedicated but experienced help desk for targeted support matters. Larger and enterprise-level businesses will implement a fully capable service desk -- which includes a help-desk function. Ideally, the help desk handles immediate tactical issues, while the service desk manages long-term strategic matters. Both resources have a meaningful place in the enterprise.

A help desk brings several benefits, including the following:

• Improved operations. The help desk offers an SPOC for all support requests. This enhances issue management, allowing for better problem routing and tracking -- leading to faster and more accurate problem resolution.
• Improved efficiency. Modern help-desk tools provide significant automation and an expanding suite of ML/AI capabilities, including interactive chat and diagnostics. Today's help-desk platforms can solve a number of issues -- and allow users to help themselves -- without the direct intervention of help-desk staff. This brings time and cost savings.
• Self-service capabilities. The comprehensive use of well-developed and maintained knowledge-base content, coupled with expanding ML/AI capabilities, can empower users to answer their own questions and take effective steps toward resolving their own problems.
• Improved user experience. Timely and effective support will greatly enhance the user experience. This leads to greater productivity for employees and partners and higher customer satisfaction.
• Improved communication. The SPOC provided by a help-desk platform is often highly integrated, combining varied forms of communication -- omnichannel -- with well-documented interactions such as customer contact and resolution history. This allows help-desk staff to collaborate, share information easily and form a more effective team.

A service desk -- as a superset of a help desk -- will offer all the benefits provided by a help desk but can bring additional benefits to the enterprise, including the following:

• Improved proactive management. Analytics and history logs can be evaluated to identify trends and recurring defects and problems, allowing help-desk managers and service-desk staff to investigate and remediate on a more proactive and strategic basis. For example, capacity limits can justify a system upgrade or a new system rollout.
• Stronger security. A service desk can support business data protection with role-based access control, encryption and other tactics that help safeguard sensitive data and maintain the organization's compliance posture.
• Incident management. Identifying and responding to an incident -- a system failure or a data breach, for example -- is the responsibility of the service desk. Service-desk staff are trained to support systems, ensure service health and performance, remediate failures and handle any of the reporting or business communications needed to address the incident. The service desk will also lead any post-mortem evaluation of serious incidents.
• System integrations. Service desks provide well-designed integrations with common IT and business systems. This allows the service desk to monitor business services and applications in real time, helping spot and resolve problems more effectively -- often before a help request is even generated.
• Scalability. A service desk must be able to scale to support growing business needs over time -- such as more services, applications and users. Scalability can be critical to service-desk success as a business grows.

How to choose between a help desk and a service desk

The choice between a help desk and a service desk -- typically including a help-desk resource -- is often a matter of the organization's size, infrastructure maturity, business needs, staffing and budget. Even then, the form and function of either resource can vary dramatically among different businesses. The rule of thumb is straightforward:

• Help desks are generally better for smaller organizations with basic break/fix IT needs, where real-time incident reporting and resolution are vital for user productivity.
• Service desks are typically better for larger organizations with sophisticated IT needs, along with a solid need for proactive planning and long-term service development and management.

The choice between these resources is often organic, growing and evolving as the business grows. For example, a business may start small and implement a help desk. As the business grows over time and more capabilities are required to implement and maintain critical business services, the resource evolves naturally into a broader service-desk environment -- gradually onboarding more tools and staff to handle the expanding service environment.

Stephen J. Bigelow, senior technology editor at Informa TechTarget, has more than 30 years of technical writing experience in the PC and technology industry.