Service Desk Software
A help desk answers questions. A service desk manages services, and the distinction is mostly about what you have to track.
What a service desk adds
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.
If all three are no, a help desk is cheaper, simpler and entirely sufficient.
The main options
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 is fixed.
Then merge the genuine repeats, where one frustrated person raised the same thing three times. That split is the whole discipline.
Frequently asked questions
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 is a help desk. It has no asset or change management, which is the line between the two categories.
Merge the repeats, link the crowd
Ticket Merger merges same-requester repeats and leaves genuine incident groups for your technicians.
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