Advantages of Centralized Help desk

A Service Desk can be considered as a point of contact between two parties, one seeking solution and support and the other providing the appropriate solution. Thus, a Centralized help desk can be defined as a centre point where in multiple parties come for issue resolution, information and support and a single team of members provide the required solution, information and support. Hence it can be seen that in case of Centralized help Desk the team handling it has to be very efficient and the application used by them should be fast, efficient and bug free. As centralized help desk manages various types of issues pertaining to various applications, domains and scenarios it should be very flexible in integrating with various platforms and comparatively fast in pulling information from various systems and applications.

As mentioned above, it can be seen that there are so many factors that should be perfectly in place without any room for error when it comes to working with centralized helpdesk architecture in the organization. Now the question arises on why to have a Centralized Helpdesk in spite of having many implications.

To answer this, there are a number of benefits of having Centralized Helpdesk architecture. Some of them are as listed below:

1. Single Point of Contact: It is a single point of contact where users from various departments and working on various processes can log their issues. This helps save a lot of time and efforts as the users do not have to login to different applications for different issues.
2. Auto generated Request number: Issue raised by any user is assigned an auto generated number. This helps in tracking the progress of the respective issue resolution. Thus, reducing the time utilized in resolution of the issue. Corrective actions can be taken in time if it is encountered that the issue resolution process is facing a halt.
3. Adds uniformity in issue resolution process: Having Centralized helpdesk streamlines the issue resolution process as users do not have to remember and follow different processes for resolving different issues.
4. Prevention better than Cure: Having a Centralized helpdesk assists in collecting information at one location which can be then analyzed to find out which application or which hardware is facing common problems frequently. Using this valuable data, proactive actions can be taken to replace the hardware or raise a change request for the application which can permanently resolve certain commonly encountered issues.
5. Performance evaluation: Having a Centralized Helpdesk can provide various customized reports which can be utilized for evaluating performance of users. Mangers do not have to refer to various applications to generate reports and then sit and collate them. This can save a lot of time and headache while evaluating the performance of the users.
6. Historical Logs: All the History logs of all the issues are maintained in one uniform format. Thus, these can be referred easily without any hassle whenever they are required. Users don’t have to toggle around various databases and files to refer the same.
7. Effective User Training: Having Centralized helpdesk makes the task of training a new employee quite easy and less time consuming as he/she has to be trained on only one help desk application and related processes and not on various different process. This makes the training effective and saves time spend in re-training.

Thus, it can be seen that Centralized helpdesk proves efficient in many ways like saving time, money. It also, plays an important role in improving performance of various applications. Hence, it’s a sensible decision to implement the same though it has certain implications that are required to be followed.

About Author:

Mohini Bhandari is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at mohini.b@spluspl.com