Service Desk — Evolution of Ticketing SystemOctober 31, 2017

Service Desk Overview

Service Desk is a ticket management system for organizations. It serves as a single point of contact for all departments within the organization, as well as for clients/customers. Service Desk enables a strong and smooth workflow that tracks all requests provides the current status of the requests and allows all authorized personnel to view the status of the request. The employees of an organization, clients, and customers would hence converge at the Service Desk for resolution of their issues.

Evolution of Ticket Resolution

Gone are the days of seeking resolution through written forms and emails. The pile of paper files evolved into email communication and that was a drastic change. Plenty of time was saved. The issues, resolution, and workflow could be tracked, but with some difficulty. For a small organization, it was fine, however, for large organizations, it was a frustrating task. Chained emails being copied to all members of a group. And to track how the issue resolution took place over time, the older emails had to be searched. Though it did resolve the issue, in the end, it was not efficient. It suffered from slow resolution and frustrating trackability. The efficiency of email ticket resolution did however vastly improve with the adoption of mobile devices for corporate business activities. This facilitated quick replies and hence faster resolution of the issues.

Present Day Service Desk

Necessity led to the development of the Service Desk. IT personnel envisioned a birds-eye-view system that provided an overall view of a ticket from the time that it was raised up to its resolution. And, now there are numerous Service Desk products that vie with each other in the market, trying to offer better workflow, more features, more visibility, better tracking, better management, integration with other modules such as email, etc..., The Service Desk is now a part of the IT Service management (ITSM). IT service management is more customer oriented with a process approach towards management.

According to Wikipedia: "The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) defines a Service Desk as a primary IT function within the discipline of IT service management. It is intended to provide a Single Point of Contact ("SPOC") to meet the communication needs of both users and IT staff, and also to satisfy both Customer and IT Provider objectives. "User" refers to the actual user of the service, while "Customer" refers to the entity that is paying for service.

The ITIL approach considers the service desk to be the central point of contact between service providers and users/customers on a day-to-day basis. It is also a focal point for reporting incidents (disruptions or potential disruptions in service availability or quality) and for users making service requests (routine requests for services)."

That sums up whatever Service Desk is about. However, vendors provide Service Desks to also be handled by Managed Service Providers (MSP) as a service. MSPs provide Service Desks as a part of a package of Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM), Patch Management and other tools.

An Advanced Service Desk

A Service Desk serves as an automated ticket management system to facilitate service requests, service-level agreements (SLA), and ticket prioritization. A Robust Service Desk is usually a cloud-based tool that also offers automatic ticket routing, comprehensive tracking and reporting, SLA tracking, automated emails, escalation procedures, and the ability to collect tickets via multiple modes - phone, web portal, email or automatically from endpoint monitors.

The more streamlined the workflow process is and how easy it is to handle, and support through mobile devices are necessities offered in a present-day Service Desk such as the Comodo Service Desk.