Introduction To remain competitive in today’s fast-paced world, businesses have to re-engineer their business processes to minimize company costs and increase their operational efficiencies. Restructuring a service desk is one way that such businesses seek to achieve these objectives. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) helps many businesses to achieve the same objective. This approach assumes the existence of one point of contact between businesses and customers (Collier & Agyei-Ampomah, 2008). ITIL often serves different purposes, but its conventional use is the resolution of customer issues. This focus does not however mean that the ITIL service desk has a limited role because experts say its purpose is broader than call centers, contact centers, or even help desks (Collier & Agyei-Ampomah, 2008). This paper focuses on important tenets of designing ITIL service desks by explaining how they affect a business’s performance. Particularly, this paper concentrates on the virtual service desk by explaining the need for businesses to shift from normal service desks to virtual service desks. Through this analogy, this paper answers important questions regarding how ITIL-based service desks improve user satisfaction, and how online user interactions (with service desk agents) improve customer trust. Deeper insights into this paper also reveal how virtual service desks reduce company costs and how centralized service desks benefit companies. However, before exploring these insights, this paper first explains the concepts of customer service and lifetime customer value because they stand at the center of this analysis. What is Customer Service and Lifetime Customer Value? Customer Service Every business appreciates the importance of a satisfied customer. More businesses appreciate the importance of timely resolutions of customer complaints because they directly affect a business’s sales performance (the ability of customers to mirror their experiences through social media and other web-based platforms especially magnifies this fact). Customer service is therefore at the heart of business operations. Selden (1998) defines customer service as the ability of a business to satisfy its customers by providing products or services. Comparatively, Turban (2002) believes customer service involves a series of calculating activities aimed at increasing customer satisfaction (usually, businesses achieve this objective when they meet customer expectations). Based on the above analysis, customer service often occurs when businesses transact/interact with customers. Such interactions may be virtual or real. Nonetheless, businesses and customers may not necessarily have the same perceptions about customer service. In fact, Martinez & Hobbi (2008) say, the importance of customer service often varies with the nature of customers, businesses, and industries. Martinez & Hobbi (2008) also believe that the success of customer service also varies with the flexibility of customers to adjust to the context of their suppliers – companies. Some researchers understand this fact from the sales process-engineering context (Selden, 1998). Through this lens, it is important to understand that customer services affect income and revenue. From the same analysis, some researchers, such as Martinez & Hobbi (2008), suggest that customer serv