Name: Carol L. SmithInstitution: DePauw University
E-mail Address: clsmith@depauw.edu
Format: Paper presentation
Suggested Audience: Primarily user support coordinators and student employee supervisors, but also persons interested in TQM (a team approach to management)
Presentation Outcome:
1. Visualize a working model of a help desk staffed by student employees
2. Know how to create a help desk with minimal funding, equipment and staff
3. Visualize using TQM to manage a focused team of student employees
Presentation Content:
Abstract:
This paper will describe how the computing services department at DePauw University used a team approach toward hiring, training and managing student staff to build a successful computing help desk from a minimal set of tools, skills and funding. It will outline the initial goals for the help desk, the steps we took to meet those goals, the obstacles we encountered, and the outcome of the project. The paper will also present the model of our help desk and our plans for future enhancements.
Paper Summary:
Despite the trend in some colleges and universities toward distributed computing support, users at many small institutions are dependent on their computing centers for direct support and assistance. DePauw University is one such university, with nearly 2,400 computing users who rely solely on the computing services department for support.
One year ago, any faculty, staff or student with questions could either contact a specific computng center "expert" or contact the department secretary to be referred to the appropriate staff member. Using this system we did answer users' questions, but it had some drawbacks: First, many users preferred to avoid the referral step and insisted on directly contacting staff members, even when they were not sure who to call. Too often, a user would call the wrong person and end up being referred to someone else. Second, the response time for walk-in clients who needed one-on-one consultation was too long. Support staff members were not always immediately available to provide those types of services and users sometimes had to wait more than a day to get assistance. Finally, we provided no evening and weekend support hours, times that are in heavy demand by students. Clearly, we needed to provide more efficient support to customers by decreasing our response time and by increasing the hours that we were available.
In the spring of 1995 we began developing a computing help desk that would address these issues. Our goals were that the help desk would serve as a central point of contact for persons needing help, through which customers could get assistance using the telephone, E-Mail or face-to-face communication. It would be staffed entirely by part-time student employees who were trained to answer most questions themselves, resulting in a minimal number of referrals. Finally, the help desk would provide extensive, consistent open hours for users' convenience.
Since its startup last fall, the help desk has effectively met those goals and more. We have transformed a group of inexperienced, yet eager, students into a solid help desk team, who successfully worked to develop both training for themselves and procedures for helping customers. The help desk now provides quicker responses to users' questions and, thus, has increased overall customer satisfaction. It has also offloaded handling common computing questions and problems from fulltime staff and significantly reduced the number of unexpected interruptions in their workdays. Because of this year's success, we plan many enhancements to the help desk starting next fall.