BDO Wave - Service Desk Lead, Cape Town

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.