Who owns the help desk in larger organizations?

I agree with Allan. There can be many Help Desks.

If your question includes Customer Service, then there may be more to discuss.
When I worked at IBM, the Customer Service for a product was owned by the product development division. There is some merit to this. The people who create the product are responsible for the costs of supporting it. Produce a poor quality product and you pay for it in the service costs.

Sometimes though, the situation gets more complex. If your product division is in the US and your customers are worldwide and want to be serviced in their language, then it might be beneficial to set up customer service organizations in other locations around the world where bilingual staff can support the customer in the local language and be able to communicate with the development division in their language.

In those cases, there might be a centralized customer service organization per country or for several countries with the same language, reporting to the marketing organization, who is motivated to ensure the customers are satisfied. At IBM, for many years, each non US country had its own customer service organization, often reporting to a customer service executive in the senior management ranks which covered all the products sold by IBM in that country.

There are other options such as creating a 'follow the sun' approach to reduce or eliminate overtime and have product specials in centers with local language capabilities that can service customers 24/7 and electronically switching from one center to another so there is always someone working day time shifts.

In the end the product development organization should oversee all the activity for their products whether it is in their own country or around the world.

Thanks, Alan. Appreciate the feedback.

Think of the question like this? Who owns the budget in a large organization? Or, who is in charge of ethics in a large organization? Philosophically, everyone should own the help desk. Like the budget, a single unit might manage the administration, but wise organization insure there is a strong link between a key source of customer intelligence and every entity.

Think of the question like this? Who owns the budget in a large organization? Or, who is in charge of ethics in a large organization? Philosophically, everyone should own the help desk. Like the budget, a single unit might manage the administration, but wise organization insure there is a strong link between a key source of customer intelligence and every entity.

Words are important. There is a distinction between “help desk” and “service desk” in that “help desk” is a just a component. Ostensibly, as you move up the Tier Level for support, the resolution requires an individual with more knowledge about the incident or problem and you are likely to end up with an IT person.

In my perfect world (which doesn’t exist), the “service desk” would be owned by the Internal Audit role, the Tier 1 support (using the same system) might be owned by the topical areas (HR, Accounting, IT, etc.). In this design, Internal Audit reports on SLA compliance which drives staffing costs and quality while remaining independent of the specific service delivery.

IT help desk software can provide terrific online service for customers. Web-based IT help desk software enables companies to access customers from mobile devices. Sales Staff can answer question on the go and turn inquiries into sale leads. The applications help business track, organize and respond to customers with a number of sophisticated options that can be utilized internally or externally. iKode helpdesk x is what I used and works very well. You can have an online demo: http://demo.phphelpdesk.org/
Or download the free version: http://www.phphelpdesk.org/download/

In the past, with complex and expensive help desk systems, it was the IT department, no doubts there. However, with cloud-sourcing catching on in the last 2 years, new help desk systems like http://www.focalscope.com, http://www.zendesk.com, and http://www.kayako.com, have made it so easy to implement and use a help desk, that an IT department, in most cases, is not required.

Kayako is really super for help desks: http://www.kayako.com/
Another one is Tele Helpdesk: http://www.resource-dynamics.com/

Many top organizations are using zendesk .But I prefer AJ Help Desk which is the best help desk software with robust ticket support solutions. It is also available in download version.
http://www.ajhelpdesk.com