Service Desk Software

A help desk answers questions. Service desk software manages services, and the distinction is mostly about what you have to track.

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What service desk software adds

Request fulfilment, with a service catalogue and approvals rather than a free-text box.

Incident management, including major incidents with many reporters attached to one record.

Problem management, separating the underlying fault from the tickets reporting it.

Change management, with approvals, change windows and a record of what changed.

Asset and configuration management, so you know which device or licence a ticket concerns.

A help desk gives you the first item on that list and none of the rest.

Do you need one?

Three questions. Two yeses and you need a service desk rather than a help desk.

Do you track hardware, licences or infrastructure alongside tickets?

Does anything require approval before your team does the work?

Does somebody in the business ask for change records or an audit trail?

If all three are no, a help desk is cheaper, simpler and entirely sufficient.

The main service desk software options

Freshservice, for mid-market IT teams who want ITSM without an implementation project.

Jira Service Management, when the service desk sits next to engineering.

ServiceNow, for enterprise ITSM and workflow beyond IT.

GLPI, if you want open source and will run it yourself.

See Freshservice vs ServiceNow and Freshservice vs Jira Service Management for the head-to-heads.

The duplicate pattern in a service desk

Different from customer support, and it needs a different response.

When an outage hits, forty people raise the same ticket in ten minutes. Merging all forty is wrong, because thirty-nine people then get no reply on their own record. Attach them to a major incident instead, so everyone is updated when it's fixed.

Then merge the genuine repeats, where one frustrated person raised the same thing three times. That split is the whole discipline.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Are service desk solutions and a service desk system the same thing?

Yes, and both mean software that manages services rather than just answering questions. Vendors say service desk solutions in the sales deck and service desk system in the documentation, and you're choosing between the same products either way.

What is service desk software?

Tooling for delivering and supporting services rather than just answering questions: incidents, requests, changes, problems and usually an asset inventory, tied to the services your organisation runs.

What is the difference between a help desk and a service desk?

A help desk handles incidents and questions. A service desk adds requests, changes, problems and assets. See help desk vs service desk.

Is Zendesk a service desk?

No, it's a help desk. It has no asset or change management, which is the line between the two categories.