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Customer Support Abstracts
Building an IT Community at Louisiana State University: Collaboration and Partnership Strategies
In 2005, Information Technology Services, LSU’s central IT department had, at best, a tenuous relationship with the 150+ department IT professional staff on campus. Meager attempts had been made to notify campus IT staff of outages and policy changes, but no major headway had been made in devoting focused energy on building rapport and a focused customer relationship with these staff. Since 2005, through the combined efforts of our Help Desk and Department Services, we focused on a collaboration strategy that involved:
- An online portal for our IT professionals to share strategies, get current communications, get FAQs and tips, share policies, best practices, training resources, and profiles of campus IT professional staff.
- Events such as Munch and Shares, Tech Talks, and semester IT Forums
- Creation of advisory groups and committees
- Change Management and Service Outage web site
- Better communications with the Help Desk and a new problem tracking system
- Other vehicles for improving customer relations and becoming more transparent
The Information Technology Services User Services department has a more focused strategy now in which collaboration with the university’s departmental IT staff, called LSU Technology Support Professionals, is key! Please join us for a discussion of these strategies, our successes and failures, and lessons learned along the way.
Collaborating Outsourcing of the IT Help Desk
Help desk staff overly stressed trying to keep up with phone calls and email? Find out how Pima Community College (PCC) and the University of San Diego (USD) eased the burden for the help desk staff by collaborating with an outside partner.
During our presentation, attendees should focus on the following: Communication between PerceptIS and Pima; PerceptIS and USD
Lesson 1
- Transfer of knowledge
- Training
- Institutional knowledge
Lesson 2
- Implementation stage throughout the course of a semester
Lesson 3
- Develop a detailed communication plan
Lesson 4
- Have timeline of other functions coming on board
- Develop realistic metrics to determine quality of service
Developing a Service Catalog for Higher Education Information Technology Services
Customers of Information Technology Services need to quickly and easily access information and ask for help when needed. With this principle in mind, we redesigned the IT Services Web site and list of services to integrate and simplify the categorization and description of the three main types of information provided:
- What services we provide
- How to request the services or get instructions to do it
- Where to get help
For this project, we had a small team head the planning and coordination for the rest of the department’s collaboration in creating, updating, and reviewing materials. We started by consulting a core group of customers for opinions on what worked well (types of content available) and what did not work well (organization, masses of text, and jargon) in the previous rendition of our site and service list, then developed our goals from the findings:
- Keep it simple
- Make it searchable
- Make it actionable
- Keep it in regular language
With these goals, we collected, evaluated, and recreated the existing list of services into a standardized catalog of services, each with links to instructions and request forms or contact information for guidance or assistance. The result of our efforts is a customer-oriented, clean, and searchable catalog of services that our customers can request that appropriately sets expectations to set the institution up for success.
Frontline Support At Princeton University; A centralized and decentralized approach
Frontline support and maintenance for desktop hardware and software systems at Princeton University has been uniquely structured allowing the benefits of centralization and the freedom of decentralization.
The decentralized SCAD/DCS (Support for Computing in Academic Departments/Department Computing Support) program is set up so that each department has their own support personnel with specialized access to all of the information from the centralized Office of Information Technology. The SCAD participates in monthly meetings with others in the program, along with representatives from the central Office of Information Technology. They are offered specialized training and certification programs determined by the needs of the departments and the direction of technology of the University. Departments are able to remain autonomous while garnering the benefits of a campus wide central administration.
The centralized 24x7 Support and Operations Center provides telephone, instant message and e-mail consulting for general technical questions and issues as well as University business application support, support for the telephone system and operator services for the main University telephone number. Any member of the University community can call or write for assistance.
This paper will discuss the funding, staffing and scheduling models for the respective programs, as well as talk about how the two programs balance and collaborate with each other and the other support resources at the University.
If We Build It Will They Come?
When the "Adobe Connect Team" at Penn State's Education Technology Services started the first pilot of the Web-based desktop video conferencing system in January 2006, we set up a Web site for posting announcements and documentation. By July 2006, it became clear that a typical, static Web site wasn't going to provide adequate support for a product as complex as Adobe Connect. What we needed to create instead was a central repository that could be easily accessed and contributed to by all of the various technical support and training units across the Penn State community as well as by individual community members. Using a Web 2.0 Content Management System, we designed a new Web site containing areas for documentation, training materials, Q&A, and much more. Each area also allows for contributions, both comments and materials, from everyone in the community. This new online community has scaled so well that it has become an international resource where users provide support for each other (meeting.psu.edu).
Student Consultant Achievement Program for Training and Performance Management
The IT Help Desk employs 15 to 20 part-time student consultants each academic term. Student consultants work part-time to provide walk-up and telephone tier one technical support at two service points. Most of the student consultant’s hours are outside of the regular work hours of the professional staff. This makes it difficult to get the student consultants trained and to monitor their performance. To address both of these challenges ITS developed the Student Achievement System. The Student Achievement System addresses two major areas that are important for the student’s to master in order to properly perform their jobs: Customer Support and Technology.
Each section has a number of activities that must be completed and evaluated. Students successfully completing all the activities are provided recognition for their outstanding performance in either or both of the Customer Service and Technology tracks. On-going feedback is provided as required for those students needing additional support. This system manages our training and performance management needs by: setting expectations of performance, providing training, providing feedback on performance and providing recognition on a job well done. The system encourages students to take a level of ownership and responsibility for their own personal development, set goals and strive to be the best that they can be.
Supergeek: Changing the Way We Interact with Students
Currently we have started to use a new interactive medium to reach our clients and cut down on overall person hours. Before May 2008 we were interacting with our client base via phone and email. Now we have implemented something we like to call SuperGeek. It is a database of frequently asked questions and answers. The question we then ask is did this decrease the number of interactions we had to have with clients? Did the number of person hours for setup offset the costs and effectiveness of the system? Is it really working? Looking from a student’s point of view, I will review what we liked, did not like and the hardest thing of all keeping to our scope of computer related questions pertaining to our students and our institution.
The Importance of Emotional Intelligence
While the subject of Emotional Intelligence still comes across as a vague concept for many people, partly because the topic has garnered numerous definitions, it has nevertheless been identified over the last couple decades as a contributing factor for project, business and career success. Some researchers have even posed the theory that Emotional Intelligence is generally a better indicator for long term career success than traditional IQ.
It has been my experience that EI as it relates to the Information Technology field is in fact a critical part of delivering consistent quality customer service to both internal and external customers. While technology has become integral throughout society, and a critical tool for nearly all business endeavors, the fact remains that technology is primarily a means to an end. Therefore, when a client cannot complete important tasks or find necessary information for lack of appropriate or functional technology they become upset by the barrier encountered. I equate information systems to cars in that these critical tools have become such relied upon technologies that when they fail to deliver the expected or needed outcome clients quickly become extremely frustrated and expect quality service in a short time period to resolve their issue.
I firmly believe that Emotional Intelligence is a key attribute toward developing meaningful constructive relationships with customers, peers and leaders within any organization. The ability and willingness to empathize with these groups of people, to genuinely understand and care about their unique priorities, needs and challenges is the foundation of both quality customer service and continuous improvement. Therefore, hiring and retaining people with this important attribute can be the difference between success and failure for a particular project or an entire organization.
Winning all Around, Providing a Help Desk Service Point at the Learning Commons
Historically, the IT Help Desk at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton campus has been located in the Engineering and Computer Science building on campus. This was the group that initially required technology support, yet now requires our support services the least. About a year and a half ago UNB’s largest library, focused primarily on the Arts and Business faculties, underwent a major renovation and reorganization when it created a Learning Commons and computer lab. The IT Help Desk was one of several service providers for students invited to provide a service point in this collaborative learning space. The IT Help Desk welcomed the opportunity to provide a more visible, accessible and convenient location to provide services to our student clients. The creation of a new service point offered challenges in remote supervision of student consultant staff, reallocation of resources (no new funding was provided) and interaction with Library staff. Opportunities to enhance our relationship with the library and improve our service to students were the rewards. The collaboration has been has been an outstanding success. Support of student owned laptops has quadrupled, library staff have been relieved of technical support questions for which they have no expertise, student consultants have an improved environment in which to work, library relations with ITS Help Desk staff is at an all time high and most importantly, our students are benefiting with better support allowing increased use of campus technology
You Want Us to Support WHAT?!? Negotiation, Delivery and Cultivation: The Gateway to Excellent Service Deployment
In 2009, the CITES (Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services) Help Desk at the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign began the transformation from Help Desk to Service Desk. This meant transitioning to new support roles and services. The introduction of new services is inevitable. Providing excellent support requires collaboration from the early planning stages through implementation and beyond.
The Service Desk experienced varied results during the integration of new services. Join us as we explore the importance of communication and collaboration between service managers and the Service Desk. We will discuss our successes and failures, past and present.
Our approach contains requirements that must be satisfied before the Service Desk takes on support responsibilities. We are the face of the organization. We must be an advocate for our customers.
We have a vision of how this organic process should work. Gaining trust and cooperation will be the foundation of a world-class institution.
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