BDO Wave - Service Desk Lead, Cape Town

The Service Desk Lead will be responsible for leading, operating, and continuously improving a client-facing Support Desk that supports multiple client organisations across managed service portfolios. This role is ideal for an experienced service desk leader who can manage day-to-day operations, coordinate support resources, own IT service management processes, and act as a trusted escalation point for clients and internal stakeholders.

The successful candidate will ensure the support desk provides a consistent, responsive, and high-quality service across incidents, service requests, problems, and changes for a diverse client base. They will also be expected to maintain clear reporting, manage service levels, support escalation governance, and help shape the operating model as the service grows.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the daily operation of the Support Desk, ensuring that client issues are logged, triaged, prioritised, assigned, resolved, and escalated in line with agreed service levels.
• Manage and improve ITIL-aligned processes across incident management, problem management, change enablement, service request fulfilment, and escalation management.
• Plan support desk resourcing, shift coverage, rotas, availability, and handover routines to ensure appropriate coverage during agreed support hours.
• Act as the operational escalation point for complex or high-priority client issues, ensuring clear communication, ownership, and timely resolution.
• Engage directly with multiple clients to discuss service issues, escalations, priorities, recurring problems, and opportunities to improve the support experience across client portfolios.
• Monitor ticket queues, SLA performance, ageing tickets, recurring incidents, customer satisfaction, and operational trends.
• Coach and mentor Level 1 and Level 2 engineers, helping them follow standard operating procedures and improve technical and customer-facing capability.
• Maintain and improve support documentation, knowledge articles, escalation paths, standard operating procedures, and reporting dashboards.
• Work with Level 3 specialists, vendors, and internal teams to ensure complex issues are progressed effectively and lessons learned are fed back into the service desk.
• Ensure appropriate escalation paths exist for on-premises infrastructure issues, including Active Directory, local network connectivity, VPN or remote access, Remote Desktop, file servers, print services, and other core business services.
• Identify opportunities to improve service quality, reduce repeat incidents, automate routine work, and optimise support costs.

Experience and skills required

• Typically 5–8 years of experience in IT service desk, managed services, IT operations, or end-user support environments, including proven experience leading or supervising a support desk.
• Strong practical understanding of ITIL service management, particularly incident, problem, change, request, escalation, and service level management.
• Experience managing ticket queues, operational reporting, service reviews, escalation processes, and client communications.
• Ability to schedule, coordinate, and manage support desk resources across BAU activity, peaks in demand, and urgent incidents.
• Strong client engagement skills, including the ability to communicate with stakeholders across multiple client organisations, explain issues clearly, manage expectations, and maintain confidence during escalations.
• Good understanding of Microsoft 365, modern workplace support, identity and access concepts, endpoint support, on-premises infrastructure such as Active Directory, basic networking, remote access, file and print services, and common enterprise support tooling.
• Experience improving processes, knowledge management, ticket quality, first-time fix rates, and operational consistency.
• Desirable: experience driving efficiency through automation, self-service, knowledge base optimisation, shift planning, tooling improvements, and cost optimisation.

Qualifications and certifications

• ITIL Foundation certification is strongly preferred.
• Microsoft 365, Microsoft Entra, endpoint management, or service management certifications are desirable.
• Relevant experience may be considered in place of formal qualifications where the candidate can demonstrate strong service desk leadership capability.

What success looks like

The Service Desk Lead will build a reliable, well-governed support function that clients trust. Success will be measured through consistent SLA performance, clear escalation handling, reduced repeat incidents, effective team utilisation, strong documentation, and positive client feedback.