In a move to coincide with National Customer Service Week, an organisation is urging small businesses in IT to recognise the role their IT support team has to play.

The Service Desk Institute (SDI) is holding a nationwide IT Service Week between October 5th and 9th and aims to get companies and IT support individuals to do their best in promoting the role they play in the day-to-day operations of businesses around the country.

It hopes that the week will highlight the dedication of the entire service desk team, whether they are first line, second line or field engineers.

Howard Kendall, the founder and chairman of the SDI, explained: "We know how much IT service and support teams care about the service they provide to their colleagues and customers; now we want them to show it."

The SDI was founded in 1981 and is Europe's only support network for IT service desk professionals, which is also able to provide service management consulting and customised training courses.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.