Support Strategies: Mastering Help Desk Excellence

The Service Desk Manager arrived at the ITIL Service Manager's office and found her staring out the window. He politely knocked, and the manager invited him to sit down, saying, "Glad to see you back. How is your SLA project going?"

"Progressing, thanks to your guidance."

"That is great! Tell me what you have done so far."

"I met with several key business leaders and explained the project and what a Service Level Agreement is. They are excited about us addressing their critical needs, and they are looking forward to a continuous improvement process partnership. However, I am not experiencing the same excitement from the various IT departments. I thought they would love to know what the business needs."

[Read More]

When the young man arrived at the ITIL Service Manager's office, he found her reading a book. He politely knocked, and the manager invited him to sit down, saying, "What can I do for you?"

The young man said, "My manager asked me to write an SLA for my Service Desk, and I don't know where to start. Another manager told me you know everything there is to know about IT best practices."

[Read More]

IT Change Management stakeholder feedback into Continuous Improvement Practice is the best and fastest way to transform Information Technology (IT) into a strategic asset for your company.

[Read More]

IT departments have always lived in a world of balancing two opposing activities with limited resources:

1. Maintaining user productivity by responding when something breaks (an Incident) or a user request for services (a Service Request).
2. "Maximizing the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed and authorizing changes." ¹

[Read More]

Cost-effective customer service means delivering fast, high-quality support at the lowest sustainable cost per interaction. In practice, that means resolving issues the first time they're raised, giving customers ways to find answers on their own, and using the right tools so agents aren't spending paid hours on tasks that can be handled automatically.

[Read More]

Understanding the difference between help desk, technical support, and desktop support is a practical starting point for anyone building an IT support team or mapping a career in IT. These three roles serve distinct functions, operate at different support tiers, and require different skill sets, even though their titles are often used interchangeably in job postings and IT org charts.

[Read More]

A help desk is a centralized point of contact where users submit requests for technical support, IT assistance, or service. Every request is logged as a ticket, assigned to the right person, and tracked until it's resolved. Help desks range from a shared inbox at a small company to a multi-tier enterprise platform with automated routing, self-service portals, and AI-assisted triage. The right type depends on who you're supporting, how much control you need over the software, and whether you want to staff support in-house or hand it to a third party.

[Read More]

What specifically needs to be included in a service level agreement? Which aspects are described in an SLA? In this post, we explain the 6 common elements of a service contract.

[Read More]

It is no secret that in the digital age, convenience and instant gratification are king. Convenience and speed are evident everywhere from cloud servers to text message jargon. Everything is designed and cultivated to be as quick as possible. But perhaps some things are meant to happen just a little bit slower.

[Read More]