Desktop Support Vs Help Desk. What’s the Difference?

It’s time to demystify a pair of certainly confusing tech terms. How do we differentiate Helpdesk Support from Desktop Support?

Let’s say you get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere. You pick up your mobile and phone a friend. They tell you how to put on a spare and what tools you need. End of conversation. Staring at the phone a few minutes, you realize you don’t even know what a lug wrench is, worse, you don’t even know where the spare is kept! Luckily, you fumble around your wallet and see your card, your triple-A card! A quick call, a few minutes, and you’re back on the road.

In our example, the Help Desk, your first point of contact, is your friend. They expect you to know a bit about your system. They can walk you through, give you information on where to find the tools and parts, tell you how to replace the tire. That’s it. If you need further help, they pass you on to the right people.

That’s what a Help Desk is. Usually, it’s a person on the phone that will try to give you some basic assistance and support. They can attempt to walk you through the problem and tell you how to solve it on your end. If it still goes south, your Help Desk will point you in the right direction and will move your concern to the best team suited for your issue, through direct transfers or a ticketing system. Help Desks are usually contract-based and have a form of Service Level Agreement between your company and the support provider

Triple-A, in our analogy, is your Desktop Support. A person comes in with their own tools, own experience, and expertise, flips your car in seconds, and replaces your tire.

A Desktop Support team can go far beyond what a Help Desk does. They can do remote control of the devices, they can remotely reset log-ins, they can remotely send updates or patches to fix your issues. And when “remote” is not enough, your Desktop Support comes in and fixes the issue right where it’s happening. Although stated in the term, Desktop Support can handle issues with networking, servers, laptops, phones, and other hardware. Mostly on a break-fix basis, they end up charging your company every issue they attend to.

Which is best for my business– Desktop Support or Help Desk?

You may think that Desktop Support is the better of the two, it’s not always the case, as Desktop Support can be a little expensive when compared to Help Desk.

There are companies that have very few IT issues and may not need Desktop Support all the time. Others have important database and information that needs constant support, and workstations that need constant care, they would benefit from Desktop Support more.

What’s best for your business? A hybrid of the two. Make sure you have a Help Desk ready for the simpler things and allow them to forward your concern to a Desktop Support, that can help you on the double. Having both of these services can minimize downtime and maximize profit for your team.

If you want to know more about getting both services from a single source. Let’s have a talk.