An organisation closes its single co-located help desk and instead staffs the function from three countries, with every contact arriving through one shared tool alongside a chatbot. A manager claims the organisation therefore no longer has a service desk. Is that right?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail medium
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The options
Not correct Yes. Once contacts are handled through automation the work becomes service request management instead
The channel a contact arrives through does not decide which practice owns it. Request fulfilment is a separate practice whether the contact came by phone or by chatbot.
Not correct Yes. ITIL requires the service desk to be a single co-located team so that knowledge is shared directly between agents
No such requirement exists. Co-location can help, but it is a design choice, not part of what makes something a service desk.
Correct No. The service desk is a practice and a point of contact, not a physical location or a single team, so a distributed arrangement is still a service desk provided it remains the single point of contact for users
Correct. What defines the service desk is its position in the flow, as the entry point where user demand is captured, not where its staff sit or how many teams they belong to.
Not correct No, but only because the chatbot is present; distributed human staff on their own would not constitute a service desk
Automation is not what makes a service desk. Distributed human staff acting as the single point of contact would qualify on their own.
Why
The service desk is defined functionally rather than physically. This matters in practice, because it is what allows follow-the-sun staffing, outsourced tiers and automated channels to sit inside one practice, so long as users still have one recognisable way in and their contacts are acknowledged, classified, owned and actioned consistently.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 7
- What it says
- The service desk is the entry point and single point of contact for all users; it need not be a physical location or a single team.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 7 and space the ones you get wrong.