IT Support in Higher Education

Introduction

Your aim is to deliver best-in-class support to all stakeholders, from students to faculty but with dwindling IT budgets and strained resources the service desk needs to consider technology without the enterprise-level price tag.

With tech-savvy stakeholders managing and providing IT support has become more of challenge – on one hand, you need to provide a helpful service while at the same time you don’t want to be spending the rest of your days swamped with tickets.

On the upside tools and platforms have advanced, the potential opportunity to both improve service and reduce costs has never been greater.

The Demands on IT Support and Service Desk

It is not just the new technology that provides IT support and service delivery challenges, most stakeholders are tech-savvy students and faculty, so consideration has to be made to:

  • Different means of communications – self-service and self- help, chat, social support including communities.
  • Have higher expectations around IT services, IT support, and the overall experience. If they don’t like a service they will avoid it, not participate in the program or worse still revert back to previous archaic methods like phoning the IT support team directly.

The challenge of delivering IT today is much more than the technology itself. What can under-pressure educational organizations do to stay relevant, and to cope?

Popular online communities: Reddit – 36% Spiceworks – 32% MSPAlliance – 11%

Eliminate Paper-Methods for Efficient Help Desk Software

If you are still using manual methods to manage IT support then help desk technology can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of IT operations.

  • Help desk software can help resolve tech issues faster and allow IT departments to work more efficiently by organising information and providing streamline workflows.
  • A help desk system automates issue resolution workflow, centralizes information, keeps everyone in-the-know and eliminates the need for direct contact from stakeholders.
  • They can help track metrics allowing IT managers to run detailed reports and discover trends that can be acted on.

67% of respondents prefer self-service over speaking to a representative.

Move Away from Phone-call Contact to Self-Help with Self-Service Portals

There’s a lot of interest in self-service portals across all industry sectors when you consider over a third of all IT tickets are for password resets implementing self-help solutions can offer real benefit for both IT support and stakeholders.

Benefiting Stakeholders

Stakeholders can reset passwords, unlock accounts, manage personal details, sync passwords against multiple systems – all without needing to call the service desk.

LogonBox enables users to reset passwords on AD, Azure, Google, Linux, AS400 & SSH user directories without needing IT support.

Financial

Self-service should also save IT money, on average a single user loses $420 per year grappling with passwords, and it takes up support agent time which could otherwise be spent elsewhere.

Benefiting Stakeholders

Stakeholders can reset passwords, unlock accounts, manage personal details, access a knowledge base for self-help – all without needing to call the service desk.

Productivity

From an IT support perspective self-service solutions significantly reduce ticket volume from the service desk – in terms of logging tickets and eliminating the need to create tickets or call the helpdesk in the first place.
Stakeholders have access to self-service portals no matter the time of day, self-service portals are available 24/7.

Streamlining Through Automation

Most service desks are under-resourced and overworked, its imperative that IT support teams find ways of being efficient with their time. Introducing repeatable processes can offer great time-saving benefits, self-service portals and ITSM software can also help through process workflows, notifications and knowledge reuse.

Automations allow for routing rules to run specific actions based on various events and variables. For example LogonBox password self- service can lockout a user if they fail three times to answer their identity verification challenges or for more powerful options, when an external ERP system pings an internal webhook LogonBox can execute a chain of triggers to create a new user within Active Directory and/or any other connected user.

Our top LogonBox customers have an average number of 15 routing rules each.

Key Takeaways

  • Successful IT support and service desk teams need to “work smart”.
  • It begins with selecting the right services and solutions to deliver best-in-
    class IT support to your stakeholders.
  • Helpdesk software defines workflow streams allowing for an organised flow of issues and eliminating the need for direct contact.
  • Password reset and management tickets account for the largest number of tickets IT helpdesk receive all of which can be solved self-service software.
  • Self-service portals provide stakeholders with the ability to reset passwords, unlock accounts, management and more without ever needing to raise a support ticket.
  • Automation extends self-help capabilities by automatically running additional tasks on the basis of events and variables.
  • Combined these three solutions can make an IT support and service desk extremely efficient and agile, and has the potential to dramatically increase productivity and cut ticket volume.

LogonBox: Everything you need to reduce support tickets and boost productivity – Free download.