service desk roles and responsibilities

 3 basic functions of the ITIL service desk

The service desk acts as a single point of contact between the IT organization and the business for all incident reports, service requests, change notifications, and any other necessary communication. The ITIL service desk responsibilities revolve around the service desk's role in incident management and request fulfillment along with communications.

Service Desk owns the incident management process

In ITIL 2011, the service desk owns the Incident Management process and is responsible for resolving incidents based on service level agreements with the goal of restoring services as quickly as possible and getting the customer back. to work. The responsibilities of the ITIL service desk that are associated with incident management include:

Incident Management Support - Service desk administrators must ensure that the proper tools, processes and skills are maintained across the service desk team to ensure timely and effective handling of incidents. Without proper support, the efficiency and performance of this ITIL service desk process is significantly reduced.

Incident Recording and Categorization : Service desk analysts are expected to maintain an accurate and up-to-date record of each reported incident, including the category / type of incident. Incidents should be organized and prioritized based on the level of disruption they cause. A service desk must properly allocate its resources for handling the most critical incidents.

Incident Resolution - Service Desk Analysts generally play the first-level support role within the IT organization - they are the ones who answer the phone or respond to your message when you first contact IT, and your goal is always to resolve the incident on the first call and restore service as quickly as possible. In cases where it is impossible for a first-level support provider to resolve the issue immediately, the incident can be transferred to a second-level support analyst or a service desk supervisor.

Incident Resolution - Level 2 : Service Desk Supervisors have responsibilities beyond resolving escalated incidents, such as taking action themselves. External support is sometimes referred to as 3rd level support - a service desk supervisor must be able to understand the problem and find the right expert who can provide a timely resolution service desk roles and responsibilities .

Handling major incidents - Some incidents are classified as major incidents, which means they cause massive business disruption and must be addressed immediately. When this happens, the service desk must react by quickly escalating the issue, recruiting third-level support if necessary, and issuing timely communications and status updates to users. Again, the main goal of the service desk in a major incident is to establish a solution and restore service as quickly as possible.

Incident Management Reports - If the organization has a problem management process in place, most of the information it receives about problems will be sent to the service desk. When an incident is reported, service desk personnel work on the problem and manage escalations until an alternative solution is found. In cases where a workaround is found, but the error is not fully understood, the service desk team reports the incident to Problem Management, where the PM team will perform a root cause analysis and find a definitive solution for the incident.

IT organizations that want to efficiently comply with these processes and additional ITIL requirements often implement service desk software such  as Cherwell® Service Management. Our ITSM suite of tools meets the requirements of 11 ITIL processes, including incident management and request fulfillment. It also helps automate some of the more tedious tasks associated with ITIL compliance, such as automatically generating incident and request logs.