What is service desk?

Why it matters

Service desk practice is where support discipline was invented: severity levels, escalation matrices, incident review, and service catalogues all originated there. Customer support teams often reinvent these badly, when the mature versions already exist and translate directly.

What to know

• Incidents restore a broken service, service requests fulfil a standard need, and mixing the two ruins your reporting.
• A service catalogue is the internal equivalent of good documentation and drives the same self-service gains.
• Severity and priority are different things, and conflating them is the most common service desk mistake.
• Asset and change data give a service desk context that customer help desks usually lack.
• Internal users tolerate self-service far better than customers do, so automation adoption is easier.

An example

Example: an employee cannot access a shared drive. That is an incident if access previously worked and a service request if they never had it. The two follow different processes, different clocks, and different escalation paths.

Common mistakes

• Treating every request as an incident, which distorts severity reporting
• Running a service catalogue nobody maintains
• Applying customer SLA thinking to internal severity levels
• Automating fulfilment before defining the catalogue

Questions