Help Desk Service Desk Publications

Here are some of the best help desk and service desk publications and books to improve your knowledge and customer service techniques.

Much has been written about managing help desks and a lot of the writing is around customer services issues rather than the software used. A lot of the service desk publications can be purchased online so here’s our round up for help desk publications.

Customer Service for Dummies

The “for dummies” series is in fact books by expert authors and marketed under the dummies brand. In reality you get an excellent insight if the author is known in their field. The customer service for dummies book is written by Karen Leland and takes you through customer service in an easy manner and includes chapters on such important areas such as surveying your customers, improving your body language, dealing with unhappy customers and techniques for face to face, email and telephone contacts. Really a good first step into customer service development and etiquette. RRP £14 ISBN 0764552090 published second edition 1999

How to Manage an IT Help Desk

I guess this is where most help desks are - in the IT department and this book by Noel Bruton provides an excellent overview around providing “support” to people. It looks at defining business goals, support as an IT function (that also covers first and second line support), types of support that can be offered from the standard helpdesk to technical support and user training, client and customer management and terminology, how to manage customers and their expectations, how to prioritise customers from the CEO to the post room, developing communications with users and within the service desk team, an overview of customer service in general and how the company board may perceive the organisation, how to market the help desk, how to start and implement a new help desk, developing service level agreements with users, managing support tickets and escalation of problems and managing staff and workflow. Phew! it’s a whopping 345 pages and covers just about everything. RRP £49 ISBN 0750649011 published in 2002

Building and Managing a World Class IT Help Desk

Again from the information technology viewpoint this paperback book by bob wooten is another foray into building help desks that are admired. Rather like the publication above it covers almost everything but also why on earth you might want to develop a service desk in the first place and what’s actually driving that decision in the office or workplace (ie: users, owners, board of directors etc or just poor service from the IT function….).  This is another huge book at 573 pages but does do the subject justice. RRP £43 ISBN 007213237X published in 2001

Help Desk Service Desk Best Practice Handbook

Now this publication moves the help desk onwards into a service desk which kind of implies proactive service rather than reactive help. The book is by Gerard Blokdijk provides information on how to develop best practice in your organisation and covers some topics not in other books on this subject. The best parts appear to be on the best structure for the help desk and how to align it with the rest of the company for best results. RRP £29.95 ISBN 1921523417 published in 2008