Technology Advisory Group

The recent survey had many comments regarding customer service provided through the Technology Support Center (TSC).  The TSC receives a high volume of calls (well over 1,000 calls each month) from faculty, staff and students, and it’s an area that IR is constantly reviewing.  They’ve really been working lately on making the TSC more efficient and user friendly.

The first step in this process was the implementation of a new problem ticketing software application called “Footprints,” which allows the TSC staff to log calls in an effective and efficient manner.  Many incoming calls are resolved by the “first level support” provided by the TSC staff members themselves, who can answer a pretty wide variety of questions on everything from email to calendaring to voice services – and they’re continually being trained on new technologies.

Sometimes, though, calls regarding more complicated questions have to be “escalated” to other IR work groups (sometimes – as in, over 10,000 times in the past year). Footprints coordinates this “escalation” to second tier support staff and automatically notifies division management if a problem ticket has not been “picked up” within a specific amount of time.

Footprints also provides immediate feedback to the end user, emailing them with a summary of the problem.  Even better, in the next few months, all faculty and staff will have access to the end user interface for Footprints — which means we’ll be able to 1) search a knowledge base for existing solutions, 2) log our own problems, and 3) check the status of past problems we’ve logged.

This new Footprints interface is part of IR’s effort to provide users with the ability to resolve their own issues.  Similarly, they’re also developing more self-service applications, like the password reset process.

If you have additional concerns about TSC customer service, please let us know so we can share them with IR.

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