Help Desk vs Service Desk
One fixes what broke. The other manages services, of which fixing what broke is one part.
Help desk
Reactive and incident-focused. Someone has a problem, they raise a ticket, an agent resolves it, everyone moves on.
Optimised for response time, resolution time and satisfaction. Most customer support tools are help desks, and for customer-facing work that is exactly right.
Service desk
Broader and process-driven, usually ITIL-aligned. It covers incidents and adds requests, changes, problems, assets and a service catalogue.
The distinguishing question is whether you need to track the thing as well as the ticket. Laptops, licences, approvals and change windows are service desk concerns, not help desk ones.
Choosing without overbuying
Buying a service desk for customer support means paying for a CMDB nobody populates. Buying a help desk for internal IT means explaining every quarter why you can't track assets.
Duplicates look different in each
In a help desk, a duplicate is usually one customer contacting twice through two channels.
In a service desk, it is forty people reporting one outage in ten minutes. The first is merged. The second is attached to an incident so everyone gets the update when it is fixed. Treating either one like the other causes real damage.
Frequently asked questions
Is Zendesk a help desk or a service desk?+
A help desk, built for customer support. Zendesk does get used for internal IT, and teams that go that way usually miss asset and change management eventually.
Can one tool do both?+
Some try. In practice most companies end up with a help desk for customers and a service desk for employees, which is cheaper than one tool doing both badly.
Duplicates in both, handled differently
Ticket Merger merges same-requester repeats and leaves genuine incident groups for your team.
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