Helpdesk Manager/Service Desk Team Lead

Helpdesk Manager/Service Desk Team Lead

About the Role:

We are seeking an experienced Helpdesk Manager/Service Desk Team Lead to manage a small, busy application helpdesk team. This is a hands-on role within the Operations team, reporting to the Operations Director and working closely with the Operations Manager, technical leads, product owners, and application developers. You'll be part of a collaborative group where everyone contributes, shares insights, and works together to deliver a consistent, high-quality service.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys improving how a service desk operates.
Your focus will be on improving ticket quality, triage discipline, communication, managing backlog health, knowledge management, and raising overall service standards. Once established, you will also resolve tickets alongside the team, particularly during peaks, absences, and priority issues.

In addition to direct support, the helpdesk also acts as a pass-through gateway for certain applications that are triaged elsewhere. Working closely with the Operations team, you will maintain oversight of these tickets, ensure they are routed appropriately, and provide reporting so that Operations has clear visibility of trends, volumes, and recurring issues across all support streams.

You will also play a central role in our transition to ServiceNow, starting with Change Management. You'll help shape how we adopt the platform, embed new processes, and prepare the helpdesk for wider ServiceNow capabilities as they roll out.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the day-to-day operation of a small Helpdesk team as part of the Operations function, ensuring workloads are balanced and the queue runs smoothly.
• Act as a working lead by handling incidents and requests directly and stepping in on priority or escalated items when needed.
• Improve and maintain minimum ticket quality standards, including templates, mandatory fields, categorisation, prioritisation and closure quality.
• Improve customer communication standards, response cadence and escalation handling.
• Establish practical knowledge management, including internal troubleshooting notes, user guidance and documentation of recurring issues.
• Define, document and embed core service desk procedures to improve consistency, onboarding and day-to-day service delivery.
• Support team learning and development through coaching and knowledge-sharing to broaden support coverage and capability.
• Maintain visibility of key blockers, risks or recurring pain points affecting the support team and raise these appropriately within the Operations team.
• Support the rollout and adoption of ServiceNow-aligned processes, starting with Change Management and help ensure helpdesk practices align with operational and emerging DevOps ways of working.
• Produce regular operational reporting on ticket volumes, backlog ageing, SLA indicators, re-open rates, update ageing, top categories and quality measures.
• Maintain a clear view of customer-reported bugs, problems and feature requests, and support prioritisation discussions with relevant teams.
• Provide coordination support during major incidents from a service desk perspective, including ensuring clear communications and follow-up actions.

Ideal profile

• Minimum 5 years' experience leading a service desk/helpdesk team, with a strong hands-on technical and operational background.
• Comfortable balancing team leadership with direct ticket handling and queue management.
• Strong practical experience of ITIL-aligned service management processes.
• Experience improving service quality, reducing rework and bringing backlog under control.
• Hands-on experience defining or improving support procedures, knowledge articles and operational reporting.
• Experience with ServiceNow, particularly where change workflows or structured ITSM processes were being introduced.
• Confident communicator with a calm, practical approach to stakeholders, escalations and service challenges.
• Able to work in a small team environment and coach by example.