Help desk — Help desk
A help desk is the team and the tool that receive user questions and resolve them. It centralises in one place whatever arrives by email, chat or form, turns each question into a ticket with a status and an owner, and keeps the history of what was answered.
What is help desk?
A help desk is the team and the tool that receive user questions and resolve them. It centralises in one place whatever arrives by email, chat or form, turns each question into a ticket with a status and an owner, and keeps the history of what was answered.
Also: helpdesk · support desk
Why it matters
What changes in a SaaS
Centralisation is the part that gets underrated. Before a help desk exists, questions live in somebody personal inbox: they cannot be shared out, there is no way to know how many are pending, and when that person goes on holiday they go with them. The value is not answering better, it is making the work visible.
Help desk in detail
What comes as standard
Shared inbox, assignment, statuses, tags, canned replies, a help centre for self-service, and reports on volume and times. Everything past that varies a lot between tools.
When you need one
The signal is simple: when two people need to see the same questions. With one person answering, a well-organised email inbox holds up longer than people tend to admit. With two, you start getting duplicate replies and questions nobody answers because each assumed the other had it.
AI help desks
Almost every current tool has bolted an AI module on top. It is worth checking where that module gets its data: if it only reads documentation, it resolves the questions whose answer is the same for everyone; if it also checks account state, it resolves the ones that depend on the specific customer too, which in a SaaS is half of them.
How Intake handles it
Questions about help desk
Are help desk and service desk the same thing?
No. The help desk resolves incidents; the service desk adds requests, changes and access management with formal process around them.
What is the difference between a help desk and a CRM?
The help desk organises questions and their resolution; the CRM organises the commercial relationship and sales opportunities. They overlap in that both store customer data, but they answer different questions: one what is wrong, the other what it is worth.
Can you run a help desk without a tool?
With one person, yes: an email alias and some discipline. Past two it stops working, because there is no way to split the work or to know what is outstanding.
Related terms
A term on its own is only half understood. These come up in the same conversation.
Service desk
A service desk is the single point of contact between an organisation and the people who use its technology services. Beyond resolving incidents, it handles service requests, changes and access, and works through formal processes: a service catalogue, service level agreements and approval flows.
Ticket
A ticket is the record of a customer question inside a support tool. It groups every message in that conversation under one identifier and adds what is needed to manage it: status, owner, priority, tags and the history of what has happened.
Shared inbox
A shared inbox is a mailbox the whole team can access, where every conversation has an assigned owner, a status and a history visible to everyone. It replaces forwarding emails between colleagues and the generic address one person quietly runs.
Help centre
A help centre is the public site where a company publishes its support documentation so customers can look things up themselves. It combines the articles with a search box, category navigation and, normally, the route to get in touch when the answer is not there.
Macro
A macro is a saved reply inserted into a conversation with one click, usually with fields that fill themselves in — the customer name, the order number. It exists so nobody rewrites from scratch what has already been answered many times.
Support tiers
Support tiers are the usual way of splitting questions by what it takes to resolve them. Tier 1 handles the known and documented, tier 2 what requires technical knowledge of the product, and tier 3 what ends up with whoever wrote the code.
