What is an enterprise help desk? 6 big business benefits

We’ve all likely heard the phrase, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Similarly, with big business comes big responsibilities. Enterprises are often under pressure to meet user expectations, juggling high volumes of customer complaints and questions alongside employee support issues and requests. Without the right tools—such as AI-powered workforce management software and an internal help desk—large companies will struggle to keep up and provide high-quality user experiences, negatively impacting business success.

To meet customer expectations and support the employee experience (EX), organizations must adopt enterprise help desks and integrate customer service software with external and internal support channels. By investing in help desk software, large corporations can leverage AI, automation, and other intelligent technologies to deliver consistent and personalized enterprise customer service, scale operations, enhance EX, and improve efficiency and collaboration.

In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about enterprise help desks, including benefits, best practices, use cases, and how to determine your staffing needs.

In this guide:

• What does an enterprise help desk do?
• 6 benefits of an enterprise help desk
• Best practices for using an enterprise service desk
• 4 examples of enterprise help desks
• Staffing calculator: Determine your enterprise help desk staffing needs
• Frequently asked questions
• Scale your support operations with AI-powered enterprise help desk software

What does an enterprise help desk do?

An enterprise help desk serves as a centralized point of contact within an organization, supporting employees and customers. Given their extensive user base, enterprise help desk teams must deliver scalable support solutions without sacrificing quality.

To optimize internal support and the customer experience (CX), enterprise help desks usually have features like:

• AI and help desk automation, which streamline workflows, provide end-to-end service autonomously, and assist agents in real time
• Omnichannel support, which enables agents to meet customers and employees where they are across channels like social media, email, chat, phone, and more
• Security, which maintains robust security and privacy protocols while following compliance regulations and prioritizing customer data privacy, especially in AI applications
• Integrations, which allow companies to connect all of their systems to reduce data silos and customize their help desk software
• Reporting and analytics, which helps teams measure their entire support operations by evaluating help desk metrics like first reply times and satisfaction scores
• Self-service, which lowers ticket volumes by enabling users to resolve issues on their own

6 benefits of an enterprise help desk

1. Boosts agent efficiency

Enterprise help desks improve agent productivity and efficiency, enabling them to handle a higher ticket volume. However, not all help desk solutions offer the same level of capabilities. Opt for help desk software embedded with AI across all touchpoints to avoid manual processes. Here’s how AI-powered enterprise help desks can elevate agent efficiency:

• Automating ticket triage by intelligently tagging and routing tickets to the most suitable agents based on intent, sentiment, and language

• Equipping agents with AI-driven guidance and response suggestions throughout each interaction

• Deflecting tickets to AI agents when applicable

• Facilitating the rapid creation of FAQ and knowledge base content

These functionalities result in significant time savings, allowing agents to focus on resolving more complex customer and employee issues.

2. Increases customer satisfaction

Maintaining customer and employee satisfaction for thousands of individuals is challenging for enterprise companies. With an enterprise help desk, businesses can use help desk software to improve satisfaction by:

• Supporting customers and employees on their favorite channels

• Giving agents context to personalize replies

• Providing agents with AI-powered tools to ensure fast response times

• Creating and maintaining an AI-powered knowledge base for self-service

When paired with intelligent routing, enterprise help desks prioritize CX and satisfaction by giving users quick answers.

3. Ensures more consistent service delivery

When businesses standardize enterprise help desk processes, agents can provide consistent service to customers and employees. Teams can leverage the help desk’s features—such as self-service tools, pre-written responses, and omnichannel support—to cater to users across various channels and meet individual needs. Customers and employees can access thorough and vetted knowledge base articles specific to their requests, ensuring consistent answers to common questions.

4. Drives personalization

An enterprise help desk empowers agents to provide service through users’ preferred communication channels while accessing their comprehensive service history and pertinent context.

• For customers: preferences, order history, and recent marketing email interactions
• For employees: manager information, tenure with the company, and office location

This capability enhances personalization, ensuring tailored responses to individual service requests. Enterprise help desks should also offer data security so businesses can balance personalization and privacy.

5. Increases scalability

Enterprise help desks enable agents to deliver excellent support experiences at scale in several ways. Leveraging AI, businesses can efficiently tackle simple and complex user interactions and automate ticket routing based on sentiment, intent, and agent expertise.

Help desks with AI-powered ticketing also streamline workflows, sort and escalate tickets, and prioritize conversations automatically—no matter how many tickets are in the queue. Additionally, self-service options free up agents to focus on nuanced issues while still providing essential employee and customer support.

6. Saves costs

An enterprise help desk automates time-consuming tasks, lowering support ticket volumes and giving agents time back, which cuts operational costs. For instance, autonomous AI-powered bots like Zendesk AI agents handle repetitive or simple inquiries, allowing live agents to focus on high-value tasks and issues requiring a human touch.

Plus, help desk software with WFM tools can leverage AI-powered forecasting to streamline workforce scheduling, reducing overstaffing costs.

Best practices for using an enterprise service desk

Whether you’re implementing an enterprise help desk for the first time or seeking to optimize an existing system, here are five help desk best practices to maximize your ROI.

• Leverage AI. AI-powered help desks can automate workflows to speed up processes, deflect tickets to AI agents to lower support costs, and assist agents in delivering more effective support.
• Use WFM and QA tools. Forecast staffing needs and automate scheduling with workforce management software. Evaluate support interactions with QA tools.
• Provide self-service options. Build a knowledge base to empower customers and employees to resolve issues independently—autonomous AI agents can also use this content to deliver 24/7 support.
• Act on feedback. Distribute surveys to customers and employees to collect feedback, and use their insights to deliver better service experiences.
• Measure and monitor KPIs. Identify and monitor help desk metrics, and leverage your findings to improve support operations.

4 examples of enterprise help desks

Explore real-life examples of companies using enterprise help desk tools and software to enhance customer and employee support.

1. Tesco

British multinational grocery and general merchandise retailer Tesco leverages a comprehensive help desk solution to provide seamless support to employees, suppliers, and customers. Initially implemented for internal support, the Tesco help desk assists employees with HR requests and technical issues. It partnered with Zendesk to streamline support access across multiple channels, particularly through help centers, resulting in significant ticket deflection.

“The success of the help centers is evident from our self-service percentage, which over the past three years has grown from just 30 percent to 73 percent,” says Adam Bruce, head of product—service desk, help, and automation.

Tesco’s self-service strategy and omnichannel support enabled the brand to achieve 83 percent positive employee sentiment.

2. Dutch Bros Coffee

Dutch Bros Coffee, a prominent coffee company, relies on an enterprise help desk for customer support and employee service across its IT, HR, and finance departments. One of the most significant advantages of this system is that it grants the support team a pivotal role, allowing them access to metrics that contribute value to the overall business.

Angie Veek, senior director of customer experience at Dutch Bros Coffee, emphasizes the transformative impact: “We’ve been able to position the CX team as a value center versus a cost center. We started sharing a KPI report with our leadership, and that really put our team on the map. All of the departments at HQ now have greater insights into the trends we are seeing, which is helpful in driving improvement plans across the business.”

3. Vimeo

Vimeo—a leading video hosting, sharing, and services platform provider with over 1.7 million paid subscribers across 190 countries—sought enterprise help desk software to scale its support operations efficiently. The brand turned to Zendesk for a scalable and easy-to-use solution.

Vimeo’s help desk software streamlines workflows, eliminating manual tasks. It also enhances the agent experience with simplified ticket views and centralizes data for seamless team performance tracking.

As a result of these capabilities and more, the team efficiently resolves over 54,000 tickets monthly while maintaining an impressive CSAT of nearly 90 percent.

4. Fender

Fender, an instrument and amplifier manufacturer, uses enterprise help desk software to optimize operations and support communication across multiple teams. In addition to operating in nine languages, Fender has dedicated service teams for various functions, including suppliers, e-commerce support, technical support, sales, and service.

Efficient routing of inquiries to the relevant team is paramount for Fender’s diverse operations. The company utilizes help desk software to foster interdepartmental communication. For instance, the Sales and Operations department leverages Zendesk to discuss pricing strategies and new deals, ensuring all relevant conversations are tracked for future reference and planning. By consolidating communication streams within Zendesk, spanning B2B, B2C, and internal channels, Fender maintains a centralized knowledge base that keeps all stakeholders updated on progress.

“We were looking for a consolidated base that would bring all of our teams together and allow them to be able to communicate efficiently with each other and with customers to maintain that centralized knowledge,” recalls Darren Antram, director of sales operations. Fender now uses Zendesk to ensure it distributes information quickly internally and externally while keeping the first reply time under 90 minutes.

Staffing calculator: Determine your enterprise help desk staffing needs

As businesses scale, it can be difficult for customer service and support operations teams to keep up with increasing employee or customer requests. Use the Zendesk staffing calculator to optimize your staffing and ensure continued quality service to your users.

Staffing calculator

Disclaimer: The above formula should be used as a guide—it shouldn’t replace a typical workforce management staffing calculator. Teams must also consider factors like agent breaks, multiple shifts, and different customer requirements.

Frequently asked questions

Scale your support operations with AI-powered enterprise help desk software

Without an enterprise help desk, providing quality service experiences at scale is next to impossible. Customer service software helps large companies streamline agent collaboration, centralize workflows, and automate customer service. Zendesk offers scalable, flexible, and secure enterprise help desk software designed for the AI era. It is fast to set up, is easy to use, and integrates with all your business systems.

Explore the Zendesk AI-powered enterprise solution today.