Help Desk & Technical Support: What's The Difference?

Helpdesk and technical support: what do they mean?

In an organization, both helpdesk and technical support have a clear position and role. Helpdesks tend to respond to customer inquiries / requests and improve the customer experience, while technical support is aimed at solving customer technical issues. Let's understand in detail the meaning of the help desk service.

What is a helpdesk?

Simply put, a help desk is your company's point of contact for problems related to your product / service. Helpdesks focus on providing assistance to customers or end users in the form of advice, guidance, or information that can help them solve problems. Designed to handle and manage basic questions / problems (for example, password reset, application support, etc.), it provides a practical and cost-effective solution. Basically, the main goal of help desk software is to fix problems.

Help Desk and Technical Support: What is the difference between the Help Desk and Technical Support?

As mentioned earlier, there are significant differences in the capabilities and approaches of the two entities in question here. Let's see the main differences between the help desk and the technical support.

1. Different objectives

The help desk support services is often the customer's first point of contact, so we take a customer-centric approach. The main objective here is to meet customer needs to increase the company's customer satisfaction rate. Help desk executives often take a more proactive approach to support and initiate communication with customers. They provide general issues and problem support, and escalate technical issues to the technical support team.

The main objective of the technical support team is to provide technical customer service. They should help customers resolve technical problems or flaws in the company's products / services. There may be perceived or actual defects within the product / service that face difficulties. Technical support personnel should identify the root causes of technical problems and resolve them as soon as possible. The technical support team is committed to unique success so that the problem is resolved and the customer does not have to call back.

2. Various approaches while listening to customer feedback

Help desk executives must be understanding, listen to their customers, and prioritize their priorities. They must assure clients that the team is in their case and that they (the client) are important to the company. Help desk staff generally recommend possible solutions to the problem at hand rather than "fix it." Recommendations are a new approach to using a new product / service or product / service.

Technical support staff focuses on looking at the problem head-on. Your goal is to resolve technical issues as quickly as possible so that our technical support members will listen to you and help you "fix" the issues you are facing. To accomplish this, our technical support staff will listen to your customers and provide detailed steps on how to resolve the issue.

3. Different Perspectives: 

comprehensive solution versus solving specific problems

Help desks are designed to take a holistic and general approach to solving customer problems. Therefore, help desk personnel should have a broad knowledge of everything related to a product or service, not necessarily a technical knowledge of its functionality.

Rather, the technical support team tries to resolve the problem using a goal-specific approach. These are divided into several subparts, such as software, hardware, networks, and systems. Therefore, we can provide highly specialized solutions to technical problems.