What is a help desk?

Whatever industry it is that you belong to, boosting customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal. Well-served, satisfied, and returning customers can help business organizations grow and unlock more significant revenue opportunities.

With excellent customer satisfaction, business owners can also determine how to strengthen their brand’s image, further influencing customer loyalty. To achieve these points of growth and improvement, having an around-the-clock support system is crucial.

An efficient help desk team would be the perfect and proactive solution to enable your business to provide quality customer service and support. 

Hiring a dedicated help desk team that can immediately respond to customer’s complaints or service requests efficiently and accurately can do a significant change in speeding up your operations, increasing flexibility, and raising customer satisfaction.

What is a help desk support specialist?

According to Chris Grosspietsch, senior manager at Zendesk, a help desk can mean many things. It can depend on the nature of your business. But all companies share the same core principle: helping people have a place to go to get help.

A help desk specialist must respond to queries in person and over the phone or other channels where customers send in their requests. 

Most IT help desk specialists, for example, assess and diagnose computer hardware and software problems and implement effective solutions such as modifying hardware systems, installing computer peripherals, and computer maintenance.

We’ve laid out the help desk job description below. Keep on reading to know more about this role’s responsibilities.

Help desk roles and responsibilities

Helpdesk functions may vary depending on the industry they operate. These help desk job descriptions apply to the generic help desk and service desk job function.

Feel free to customize what we have listed below and tailor it to what your company needs!

Main duties and responsibilities

A help desk support specialist is expected to:

• Provide customer support on the company’s computer applications and platforms—it can be through your website or via email;
• Respond to requests and inquiries for technical assistance in person, via phone, chat, or email;
• Troubleshoot technical hardware and software problems and resolve them with appropriate actions;
• Conduct system and software updates;
• Research questions with the use of available resources to answer customers’ queries;
• Keep records of all help desk interactions;
• Provide follow up assistance to customers and users to ensure complete resolution of issues;
• Redirect problems to an advanced support specialist if the issue is not resolved with their level training;
• And escalate situations requiring urgent attention, if necessary.

Key skills and competencies

First and foremost, to ensure that you only hire the right help desk specialist, it’s essential to set your business standards in terms of having advanced knowledge of computer software and hardware systems. This key point is vital to assist your customers.

Since they will be constructing responses, emails, instructions, and resolutions, help desk specialists should have outstanding oral and written communication skills, preferably with customer service orientation.

Interest in problem analysis and problem-solving is also a driven qualification for a help desk specialist to provide the highest resolution needed in handling technical problems.

A great help desk specialist should adapt to a fast-paced environment and can provide support online and offline.  It’s also a win-win if they are a team player with a dedicated goal for resolutions.

Salary and compensation

A help desk support specialist’s salary and compensation vary depending on the industry and the country where they work. 

A help desk specialist working in China typically earns an average amount of 23,400 CNY per month. The salaries range from 18,900 CNY to 32,700 CNY, which is the highest rate. In China, this is the monthly average wage plus housing, transport, and other benefits. 

Benefits of outsourcing your help desk specialist

If you are still hesitant about hiring a help desk specialist, we’ll make it easier for you by laying down all the key benefits of outsourcing help desk specialists:

Make room for your core needs

When there’s a help desk specialist ready to take care of all your company’s technical problems, your in-house employees have more time to focus on more profitable endeavors. 

Having a dedicated help desk specialist leads to increased productivity, meaning more revenue. Your in-house employees also benefit since they can focus on their responsibilities instead of handling other support requests. 

Round-the-clock support

Businesses have the usual 9 to 5 office hours, which means customers have no support for the rest of the night and day. 

Companies that outsource help desk support can provide customers with assistance even outside the 9 to 5 hours. By outsourcing, you’ll also have the option to give businesses 24-hour assistance. 

Since customers can have technical problems any time of the day, we’ll never know when they need you. To make sure, you’ll want to provide round-the-clock support to avoid frustrated customers.

Proactive interventions

Every day, help desk specialists gather and verify the information to resolve customers’ technical problems. They do this by running performance reports to determine if their computer systems and hardware have issues. 

They also record and report these issues to businesses before these systems experience worse scenarios. This proactive intervention gives the company the time to replace the system before it fails.

Qualify for a help desk position

If you are an employer, make sure you take notes of what makes a great help desk specialist. 

Hiring the right set of team will make tons of things convenient for you and surprises you with results you could only imagine beginning today.

If you want to qualify for a help desk position, review all these help desk job descriptions, duties, and responsibilities. Ensure you possess all the skills necessary to provide only the best customer service support for your customers.