What would happen if our regular help desk integrated with social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, etc. Would it be possible? Will it be useful? Will it increase the load on the help desk or reduce it? Will it help the end user or hamper him?

ITIL itself defines the help desk as a “single point of contact”. Social networking talks about collaboration – multiple points of contact. Aren’t they really paradoxical?

Let’s look at how organizations function. They have multiple end users, an IT department with a support team  that helps the end users with most of their IT problems. The end user contacts the support team when he/she has a problem. The support team resolves the issue. And they have a system to keep track of all this work. Most companies are like this. Throw in a few ITIL concepts, and you set up processes for incident, problem, change management. Keep an inventory of all the assets in the organization. Call it the CMDB. And so it goes on..

Now let’s add some of that social networking in there. Let’s take Facebook as our first example. There is no doubt that Facebook is a popular web application and many users spend their daily time on this service. So why not integrate your help desk into Facebook? What does that mean? One possible meaning is that your users could directly report the problem to you via Facebook. So you build an app that integrates with your office helpdesk and users can directly report problems or request services from there. The support team can look into the request and close within the help desk and let the user by writing on his wall. There is one problem though. Would you want to tell the whole world about all the problems you are having at work? Are IT support teams confident to go out in the public space and show the world the stuff they are made of.

Twitter. The user tweets his problem to the support staff. Staff resolves the problem and tweets back. There could be an implementation of this for the intranet, where the user can simply open a common portal and enter their request and hit the send button. Other end users can see the common tweets and they can simply retweet it. So now the IT team knows they have a problem at hand. Yammer is like Twitter for an organization but I am not sure if it can be used as an alternative to a help desk software. It is not going to be easy to convince everyone to tweet their problems, when we are so used to email.

Twitter is already being used by the external help desk or the customer service department. We have heard of how Comcast and Dell have tracked end-user user conversations on Twitter and how this has become a whole new channel of communication for customer service.

Let’s take a look at some collaboration software like Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Would that be useful to the IT support enterprise? They could be used to edit technical documents among the IT staff (Wikis can be very useful for this). The end user can view these collaborated documents and use them to resolve the problem or access the service themselves. The IT team can check out what document has popular demand and take appropriate action.

So let’s come back to our first question – Would it be possible? Yes. But I don’t know of any vendor who has got these features already. The more time people are going to spend on the Internet and the more social networking sites become popular, people will only become more comfortable with this type of usage.

Will it be useful? Yes. But IT teams are not going to want a lot of exposure to the outside world. Most of the requests that come to the help desk and incidents and problems and we don’t want our users talk about our problems in the outside world. But we could try internalize it – use social networking features within the organizations and leverage the power of the cloud within your network.

Will it increase the load on the help desk or reduce it? Will it help the end user or hamper him? It would definitely help the help desk reduce its work load but I think it will only work for help desk that are open to new technologies. Let’s face it – there are many managers out there who are not going to like other people doing their job. But for the open-minded help desk, social networking would be the added advantage.

What do you think? Do you think social networking would help the help desk or the IT support team? Will it benefit the end user? Let us know in the comments below.