The IT service desk is the team and the software that receive every IT request from a company's employees, log each one as a ticket, send it to the right people and track it until it is solved. It is also called the IT help desk. Employees reach it through a web portal, by email, in a chat window or by phone.
The central product is IT service management (ITSM) software. It holds every ticket and moves it through a fixed series of steps. It also keeps a list of the company's laptops, servers and applications, so a technician can see what each employee uses.
A large share of tickets are the same few requests: a locked account, a forgotten password, a new laptop, or access to an application. More and more of these are handled by an AI service desk agent. The agent chats with the employee, and it also acts. It resets the password or grants the access itself. It is one kind of AI customer service agent, with employees in place of customers. When the agent cannot solve a problem, it raises a ticket for a person.
Some problems need a technician to work on the machine itself. Take, for example, a hotel chain with its head office in Jaipur and 30 hotels across Rajasthan. The billing computer at the front desk in Udaipur freezes during check-out time. A technician in Jaipur uses remote desktop software to take control of the computer and fix it in ten minutes. Nobody has to travel.
Small firms often have no IT staff of their own. They pay an outside IT firm, called a managed service provider, a fixed monthly fee to act as their IT department. This is a managed service. The provider runs a managed service provider platform. With it, the provider watches every client's machines, holds their tickets and sends each client a monthly bill.
The service desk is the customer help desk turned inwards. A customer help desk answers the company's customers. The IT service desk answers the company's own employees. Several software companies sell both, built on the same software.