In case you happened to miss the first part in this mini-series documenting the Virtual Help Centre, please first read the first part.
Prologue
Prior to the advancement of technology people actually went to where the experts were at to get advice and help. This for many cultures around the world all started with the traditional ways of solving various things from solving disputes through the king at His palace to getting herbs for your headache at your local apothecary(or witch doctor if you’re from that part of the world). Asia Pacific University has always strived to improve the experience of staff and students on a daily basis as this improves performance and future growth. With these aspirations combined with the use of technology for various fields across the board, confusion and usability issues will definitely arise. In response to this, APU provided a helpline email to assist with all sorts of queries and requests. As APU grew in size, so did the queries, in frequency and complexity(and eventually, in repetition).
A list of the issues associated with the early forms of assistance:
If you have ever seen/been(in a movie or reality) someone sleep-talking, you’d notice it’s usually the subject that’s been on their mind while they were awake. Taking a look at the various medical responders to the COVID-19 pandemic with a particular focus on those that from the beginning were most active in patient care such as doctors and nurses; an issue arises concerning their mental state of being. Going through that many people on a close to (and eventually, a really) personal level, left a toll on their consciousness, veteran nurses considered quitting and doctors grew depressed. We take this moment to thank the entirety of the nation of people across the globe that have responded to the threat to our health and livelihoods.
Turning back to the topic; handling a particular set of issues back to back will make you call your friend the wrong name and type “query” on your Grab car destination. Below is a brief list of the issues that with the continued use of email to assist a constantly growing number of people will always arise:
- Increase in spam and phishing attempts: anywhere there is a considerably large number of people’s requests being processed becomes a beacon of opportunity for the bad guys. Parties of people had taken notice of APU’s growth and correctly assumed there would be an increase in the number of emails and saw an opportunity to send emails with attachments intended to spy on sensitive information.
- Large amounts of time spent responding to emails other than building spaceships, or ApSpace and Moodle, we’ll do space ships later, might as well at this rate.
- Inconsistent standard of responding to emails: The response team delegated to staff and student queries consisted of a wide range of people, this would therefore mean one can not expect responses to be the same across the board, we’re not robots you know.
- Lack of query status updating and tracking: Consider how many conversations a local celebrity might have on their mobile device. Without a communications manager(something that did not exist to non-politicians a few generations ago) this celebrity would not be able to keep up with anything from their next performance to their wife’s birthday(an immediate red card if forgotten). This is the same when it comes to handling queries through email, there’s simply no way to keep track of absolutely every query and activity thereof without being glued to the screen constantly clicking away at the refresh button and emailing people to find out if they have been served, this can also be described as a slow decline to madness, so please open tickets 🙂
- Simply forgetting: Everyone(of age) has a story of something burning on the pot or in the microwave. I personally have forgotten to pack my trainers for school and ended up either barefoot on the football field or in my school shoes waiting for the ball as a long-off fielder in cricket.
Our take on these issues: not only does processing queries through an email format take a mental toll on any team assigned to do so. It also leaves them vulnerable to attacks, disorganized, overly clustered with repetitive emails(people do know it only takes one email to file a specific complaint, right ?) The cherry on top of all this is that handling queries through email leaves the technical support teams less productive on the purpose of which it was conceived for in the first place.
The Logic Behind The Switch To Help Desk Software
- Avoid intertwining tasks, accurately delegate work: receiving queries in a specific format makes for quick identification, and therefore the right people receive the right tasks faster and can therefore begin working and solving issues earlier.
- Integrate familiarity with the knowledge base through smart suggestions: as time went by, certain queries would appear highly similar to one another and this led to the design of the knowledge base, containing numerous articles on pretty much everything one can do(on a pc) at APU. This, therefore, means that these not-so-new queries can be redirected towards the knowledge base which would essentially mean that staff or students find solutions to a large number of issues already explained in the knowledge base.
- Creates a platform to set standards on workflow: A centralized platform for processing and directing requests means that a workflow can be established and followed on a day-to-day basis.
- Tracking performance, query processing time, and error handling: being able to register each query on a virtual help center would mean easy storage and maintenance on each one’s individual status and statistics.
- Centralize queries; all forms of analysis and tracking require a central basis/platform. This is like the Olympics, a centralized event for all registered sports. Having a virtual help center means that all varying queries are stored and categorized for tracking and documentation in an efficient fashion.
What we can draw from all this:
It would be as if to throw diamonds into a muddy river to consider all the issues associated with sticking to email queries and the potential beauties and logic of using help desk software and not go for it. The team was then set to create the earliest platform for handling queries and distributing information and this platform was titled the Asia Pacific Information Exchange, but that’s a story for the next read….