One of the philosophies we used when we started the business several years ago was that people deserve to get help in the manner that is most convenient for them. It’s a fundamental characteristic of providing SERVICE instead of just support. Be it a call, a chat session, a web form, an e-mail, self-help, self service, crowdsourcing…whatever means was most convenient and with which end-users were most comfortable. That philosophy has permeated everything we have done, since our inception.
In the early days of the company, we used to put our clients through an exercise we called “defining the base-line” or colloquially, defining the entitlement. Basically it suggested that each member of the education community, student, faculty and staff should expect a certain level of information technology and associated support. That “baseline” was determined by the philosophy of the institution, the expectations of the groups and the budget available. It included hardware, connectivity, software, and of course, support services. It was a great exercise for our clients and it turned out to be a great exercise for us. We learned a lot about the value of support services and what end-user clients really wanted. More importantly, we learned that a “one-size fits all” approach to service was an inadequate value proposition.
People really do want to get help in the manner that is most convenient for them. A service model that pushes people to a single or even primary service process is a flawed model. As service providers we need to have numerous “arrows in the quiver”. Just offering self-help, or just crowdsourcing or just a call center is inadequate to meet the demands and preferences of the contemporary student, faculty or staff member. We continue to put as many arrows as we can into the quiver. And importantly, because we capture so much data about the incidents we help folks with; we can draw some interesting conclusions:
- Students rarely call the help desk. They e-mail or chat or text or submit web forms. And they will use self-help up to a point. They also use peers, walk-in centers and often just plain old Google.
- Faculty almost always call. It’s just a fact. Many take advantage of our remote access capability to fix their issues. They almost never use self-help.
- Staff members generally call. They also use e-mail and take advantage of remote access. Like faculty, they almost never use self-help.
Interesting conclusions from the data we have collected. Proponents of self-help focused systems will point out that quality and ease of use (as well as advertising the solutions site) will increase self-help utilization. However, statistics from the Help desk Institute (HDI) indicate that that is not necessarily true. In fact, a 2007 study by HDI concluded that only 3% of incidents were resolved at the self-help level. While our data shows that the resolution rate is somewhat higher for University based self-help, the resolution rate is still well below 10%.
Sooooo…what does this all mean? Pretty simply it argues for a quiver full of arrows when it comes to support services. There is no “one-size fits all” solution. It’s a lesson we learned way back when we began doing the “Baseline” consulting gigs and it’s a lesson that has been reinforced by the statistics we (and the HDI) have developed over the past several years.
