When creating an Information Technology Help Desk or Service Desk, the most common and well used framework or methodology is by ITIL – Information Technology Infrastructure Library. ITIL framework revolves around the discipline of IT service management (ITSM).
ITSM takes you through the best practices of creating a ITIL based Support System for any company – small or big. However the most important aspect of any Help Desk is the creation of a Single Point of Contact (“SPOC”) centre. This can be done using a simple ticketing tool such as Zendesk or an centralized platform such as ManageEngine
The concept of SPOC is that any ticketing related incident should be reported (not verbally) to a central platform which can be then logged and tracked for incident prioritization or incident closure. Currently most organization not following this practice may be using an email which is usually emailed to their IT helpdesk or to a contractor. The issue of doing this is that the contractor is a third party person who has no “fully” vested interested in the performance or excellency of your business. So the emails will be dealt to your full satisfaction, but as a company you will not gain any insight from this. And for the former case, if its being emailed to a helpdesk, with many emails flowing through this inbox the chances are that they will be difficult to track and logged.
This is where the SPOC helps companies to keep track of tickets, keep track of devices that are faulty as well as key track of repeat offenders (person or machine). Once an SPOC is established, this can be expanded to other factors such as to e-learning, asset management and other areas of ITSM