Service Desk And Help Desk: What's The Difference?

What is a Help Desk?

IT help desks are generally considered more tactical, and their primary purpose is to help resolve immediate end-user needs and technical problems and incidents quickly. The help desk service are reactive in nature, but are expected to be efficient and fast. The IT help desk may be separate or be part of a larger service desk operation to improve customer service across the organization.

What is a Service Desk?

The IT Service Desk is a more strategic, inter-organizational and broader feature. The service desk examines a wide range of business needs and contexts, rather than focusing on solving user needs like a help desk.

The ITIL definition of a service desk (service operation) is a single point of contact between service providers and users. A typical service desk handles incidents and service requests, and handles communication with users. Service desks generally have a help desk component, but the overall goal is to actively work to improve IT and business processes across the organization. The best service desks are always looking for opportunities to run all IT processes, including help desks, more efficiently.

Service desk vs. Help desk: What’s The Difference?

The service desk is an evolution of the help desk, born from the ITSM ITIL best practices framework (previously known as the IT Infrastructure Library) and based on the basic concept of "IT Management as a Service".

Help desks were born out of IT centricity (mainframe computing), while outsourced service desk were born out of IT services centricity (ITIL's approach to delivering IT as a legacy service).

It may seem trivial, but for most people, help desks provide help, while service desks do.Help desks are considered to be focused on repairs (what ITIL calls incident management), while service desks are not only focused on repairs but also on service requests (requests for new services) and requests for information ( “What should I do for X?” There is also no reason why help desks cannot provide these additional features (aside from IT terminology trends).

While help desks were a complement to existing IT activities, service desks are part of an ecosystem of IT service delivery and IT support based on what is called the "service life cycle". There is probably a great reason why ITIL used the term service desk instead of help desk.

Those familiar with ITIL claim that the service desk is strategic, while the help desk is tactical. Of course, this depends on the organization.

Help desks may be considered in part to provide a subset of the service desk functionality, or may be considered limited in scope by statements such as "Service Desk Evolution Help Desk".