Beyond Evolution: The Transformation of the Princeton Help Desk

Name: Chris Jones

Institution: Princeton University

E-mail Address: cfjones@princeton.edu

Format: Paper presentation

Suggested Audience: Staff of help desks, information centers, technical support. Anyone who needs to track customers and maintain a knowledge database.

Presentation Outcome:

1. Understand the advantages of implementing call tracking software.

2. Understand the nature of difficulties in implementing an integrated call tracking / knowledge database system.

3. Have a better idea of the right questions to ask when evaluating different call tracking software packages.

Presentation Content:

As is the case at schools everywhere, the Princeton University computing environment is growing quickly, both in terms of the number of computer users and the amount of use by the average member of the University community.

The Help Desk faces the challenge of supporting an expanding user community with a constant staffing level.

To meet these challenges, the Help Desk has replaced its paper-and-pencil call tracking system and brain-based knowledge database with integrated call tracking / knowledge database software. This software has been in place for four months (eight months by the time of the conference) and has been widely accepted by the consultants from the outset.

The implementation of the call tracking portion of the software was relatively smooth, since it was a great improvement over our previous system. The implementation of the knowledge database has proven to be a much more daunting task.

A primary goal of the Help Desk, and one which will be key to our usefulness to the community, is making all or most of our knowledge database available to the university community directly. One of our primary goals for the next few months is to make this database available via a web interface.

Outline:

1. SHORT background on the Princeton computing environment (2 min)
2. SHORT background on how the Help Desk used to work (1 min)
3. The basic idea behind a call tracking / knowledge database system (3 min)
4. How it works at our Help Desk, features that we find useful, features that were easy to implement (8 min)
5. Problems that we have encountered, features that were difficult to implement (6 min)