Help Desk Description
A help desk is a technical job where the help desk staff helps people with computer related problems. The help desk personnel are computer experts in either specific computer software/hardware or common issues related to several different areas connected to computers.
Commonly there are two types of help desks:
- Internal Help Desk
- External Help Desk
Internal Help Desk
Internal help desk is the helping staff for the employees of the company with the computer related problems. These problems can be anything; It can be a hardware related problems or it can be problem related to software functionality. Usually all help desk staff have some help desk software that helps to solve employees problems as quick as possible.
These software have some abilities like remote access to employees computers, installation issues and much more according to several technical problems.
These software have some abilities like remote access to employees computers, installation issues and much more according to several technical problems.
We all know that we are living with computers since a long time, computers are becoming a part of our life. But it can not do all things for us. Even it is also not possible to solve all problems on distance. A help desk also has some people who have to go and solve some problems manually. These people are in many cases called 'Runners'.
External Help Desk
External help desk is the helping staff for the external users. Suppose that you are the user of a xyz accounting software and you are having some kind of problem with it. You bought the software from xyz company. Mostly there are several companies that provides a support environment which is a built in tool from where you can go and ask for the support. If you are facing any problem with your accounting software then you can easily go to that tool and ask for the help to the support team. The support team is the help desk people who can fix the problem from anywhere.
Like this the help desk people uses several kind of software that helps there customers as quick as possible. Usually there are no difference of working between internal help desk and external help desk. They both are used for fixing the computer related issues.
The help desk software often includes a lot of functionality to help them more efficient, like:
- Chat connected to issues
- Connection to the phone
- Discussion boards
- Time management
- Issue management
- External portals for customers / users
- Automatic workflow to help increasing quality
- Wiki or some other knowledge management tool
- Resource database, both users as well as the hardware and software they are using
- Support for several teams and skill based management