It460 Unit 9-Scr Help Desk

SCR Help Desk

A help desk should offer user training, answer technical questions, and enhance user productivity. A help desk should document carefully all inquiries, support tasks, and activity levels. The information can identify trends and common problems and can help build a technical support knowledge base. A help desk is a centralized resource staffed by IT professionals who provide users with the support they need to do their jobs. A help desk has three main objectives: Show people how to use system resources more effectively, provide answers to technical or operational questions, and make users more productive by teaching them how to meet their own information needs. (Shelly, 2011) According to whatis.com, a help desk is a place that a user of information technology can call to get help with a problem. How this help desk is arranged varies, depending on the size and structure of the company. For smaller companies, the help desk is often a single person sitting at a phone, working to solve user problems when possible. If the problem cannot be solved over the phone, either the person taking the call goes to the user to resolve the problem or it is escalated to another group, which will do the same.

For many years, companies large and small have maintained a help desk that was internal to the company. But in recent years, many have started to outsource this task to outside companies. Such outsourcing can prove advantageous for some businesses for many reasons. One reason for outsourcing help desk operations is access to more skilled employees than the company might be able to able to hire internally. Because external help desks usually offer the service for multiple companies, they are better able to afford the salaries and benefits for experienced help desk personnel, thus improving the ability of the help desk operators to resolve problems in a timely manner. External help desks have a much larger database of problems and solutions to search....