Tag Archives: walk-up

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Bringing Walkup Customers to 213

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Now that we are in our new layout, it is time to start bringing walk-up customers from 201 into the remodeled 213 area.

The following is the threshold for helping customers in 201:

  • Less than 3 minutes: if the customer’s request can be solved in less than 3 minutes, we will help them at the welcome desk in 201. 
    • Examples: Email setup on a phone. Wireless setup.
  • More than 3 minutes: Create the ticket with the brief synopsis of what the customer needs. Ask the customer to wait a moment. Go to 213/213A and find an available technician to help. Bring the tech back to 201 to meet the customer and brief them on the customer’s request.

Student technicians working in 201:

  • Welcome desk: your task is to keep customers flowing and not let people bottleneck at the front. If a problem cannot be solved in under 3 minutes, find a technician in 213/213A to help them. If there are no walk-up customers, work on tickets. No builds at the welcome desk.
  • Desks in 201: your primary task is to answer the phone. If no one in 213/213A is available to help a walk-up customer, you may help them at a desk in 201. If there are no calls, work on tickets or builds.

Student technicians working in 213:

  • Desks in 213/213A: your primary task is to answer the phone. If there are no calls, work on tickets or builds. If a walk-up customer comes in and you are available, AUX your phone and help the customer.

Mentors:

  • Mentors (full time staff) working in 213/213A and 201 will be available to assist technicians helping both walk-up customers and customers on the phone.
  • Mentors will have an orange cone on the end of their desk to indicate they are available to help. 
  • Mentors should also help the welcome desk folks ensure the smooth hand-off of customers to a technician at a desk.

Mentor documentation has been updated here to reflect this change: IS Service Desk Process Guide – Staff Roles

Weekends and Evenings

The above instructions apply to Monday-Friday 8am-5pm hours. During weekend and evening hours, all student technicians should be working in 201 and assisting customers there.

 

 

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Service Desk Digest 3/20/2017

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OSU Mobile App Launching Soon

The OSU Mobile App is due to be released starting this week. The IS Service Desk will be the first point-of-contact for questions about this service. We do not expect to get a large number of questions about the app. We will assist with basic usage and escalate all other issues to Web and Mobile Services.

Please review the OSU Mobile App Service InfoSheet and let me know if you have any questions.

Always Make a Ticket

In the past I have made exceptions to the “always make a ticket” rule but that has caught us up short several times recently. If you help a customer via phone or walk-up, you should always make a ticket. If you did not get the customer’s name, please assign the ticket to “Phone Log”.

The following script can be helpful to assure you always get the customer’s name (from section IS Service Desk Process Guide – 3.3 Call Processing Workflow):

Tech: “IS Service Desk, this is <name>. How may I help you?”

<Listen to user request>

Tech: “Okay, before we get started can I get your OSU ID or name?”

Long story short: if you spend any amount of time talking to a customer, please make a ticket.

Walkup Policies

Reminder: our offices are for work only and are not a place to hang out when you are off-shift. This is particularly true in the Service Desk Walkup as we have limited space to help customers and too many people in the room can discourage customers from coming in.

The only people who should be in the Walkup are people currently on-shift or customers.

Techs who are off-shift can be in the call center so long as they are not disruptive and not taking up space needed by people on-shift.

If you need a space to eat or relax, you are welcome to use the couch in 213, or the break room downstairs (please take your food trash to the can outside). If you need a space to do homework, there is an entire lab downstairs full of desks and computers, paid for by student fees. I hear it is run by some nice folks.

Getting Help

The following are some ideas for when you don’t know how to resolve a customer’s request:

  • Review relevant documentation. If you are totally new to the topic, it is a good idea to let the customer know you need to do some research. You can ask them if they want to wait, or be contacted by us later. Get all of the pertinent details before letting them go.
  • Ask a colleague or staff member in your area for assistance. Be prepared to answer the following questions:
    • Who is the customer? Are they an employee, student, affiliate or other? Where are they located? Are they a CN customer?
    • What type of device do they have? Windows or Mac? Laptop, desktop or mobile? What browser?
    • What is the customer trying to do? What error messages did they see? How urgent is this problem or request?
    • What steps have you already tried to resolve the problem?
  • Escalate the issue. If you are not sure what to do and no one is available to assist, let the customer know that you will make a ticket and have someone get back to them. The customer may be disappointed, but this is better than making a guess and being wrong. Make sure all the pertinent information is in the ticket and assign it to “Service Desk – Escalation (Group)”. A supervisor will review the ticket and either reassign it or give you more information to resolve the issue.
  • Communicate with the customer. When you an escalate an issue, you should always send an update to the customer. It may take some time for their request to be resolved, but keeping communication going lets the customer know that we are still working on their request.

Do you have other suggestions? Post them in the comments.

 

 

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Service Desk Digest 1/20/2017

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Salmon Bowl

Jeff will be helping out again at the Salmon Bowl in February and April this year. Todd and Jeff were able to secure from CPHHS a laptop cart with Dell laptops for the event. With help from Thomas, Jeff and Jim Galloway, we will be able to upgrade the drives to SSD by re-purposing old lab hardware. Nicely done, guys!

Exchange Issues

The issue with “Microsoft Exchange administrator has made a change that requires you quit and restart Outlook” should be fixed by emergency maintenance tomorrow, 1/21/2017. The root cause was a configuration problem at the load balancers. This should also resolve the issue for customers who see this error when roaming between wired and wireless. More info: 2433305

The intermittent Exchange outages we have been seeing for the past couple weeks are a separate issue. It appears to be a problem with some Mac clients. In some cases, it appeared to be an issue with malware, and in one case with an out-of-date Mac Mail app. The clients open too many connections to the server, causing a performance hit and resulting in disconnects for other users talking to that mailbox server. Server Support are monitoring for clients making too many connections, and are disabling them and notifying desktop support teams as they see this happening. More info: 2531723

Field Techs

Vu Le is now a trained field tech. The current list of field techs available for on-site appointments has been updated. See the Appointment Scheduling Workflow section under Call Center Processes in the ISCS Service Desk Process Guide for details.

Walk-up Access to Back Office

The walk-up area now has a key for after-hours access to the back office, where CN computers are stored before and after the build process.

The West door to the back office area should be unlocked during business hours (Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM). At all other times, it should be locked as no one will be staffing those areas.

Thank you to Angela and Max for taking care of that. And thanks to Thomas for bringing up this issue.

Professional Conduct

As a general reminder, please note that food is not allowed in the walk-up at any time, even if you are not on shift. Everyone is welcome to eat in the call center. Please do not eat while you are taking calls – no one wants to hear that, and I don’t care how careful you are with the mute button.

This is also a good time to remind everyone that trash pick-up is on Tuesday evening only. Please do not leave any food trash in the call center or walk-up.  It smells bad and is not kind to your co-workers. There are trash cans just outside the building that you can use.

As space is sometimes tight in the walk-up, please do not hang out in there for long periods of time when you are not on shift. It doesn’t look good to our customers if they walk in and see us playing games, looking at our phones, or goofing off.

Likewise, when working in the call center, please be aware of how loud your conversations are. Technicians working nearby may not be able to hear the customer well over the background noise.

Campus Labs

Reminder: if a computer breaks in the lab, please put one of the “out of order” signs on it, AND assign a ticket in TeamDynamix to the Campus Labs group. Include information in the ticket about what is wrong with the machine.

If you are trying to fix a computer in the lab, you can always ask for help in the #is-campus-labs channel in Slack. However, this is not a substitute for making a ticket.

After hours “special” access to the labs: starting this week, students and employees can fill out a form to request after-hours access to the computer lab in the basement of Milne. The forms should be submitted at the walk-up, and then will be given to the Accounts team to process and reprogram the doors.

 

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Service Desk Digest – 8/16/2016

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Customer Service Training

On Tuesday 8/9, all full-time staff in Client Services attended a customer service training provided by Kristen Magis from HR. The goal of the session was to work through the training modules and customize them to our needs. Kristen will also be helping us turn this into a Canvas module so that student workers can do the training ad-hoc.

Box Training

Box is slated to be made available to all students and employees in a soft launch on September 7. The Service Desk is the tier 1 point-of-contact for Box support.

All Client Services staff and student workers (everyone who is here this summer) should be able to login to oregonstate.box.com now. If you had trouble accessing the training before, please try again via this method:

  1. Login to oregonstate.box.com.
  2. Click on “Get Training” on the right.
  3. If this is the first time you have gone to the Training site, wait 1 day before doing the next step.
  4. Search for “Helpdesk Essentials”, click on it, and choose “Launch”.
  5. If that doesn’t work, click on your profile at the top-right, then choose “Transcript” – the training should be listed under “Active”.

Walk-up Moving to Milne

There is a project underway to move the repair and tier 1 services of the walk-up desk from the Library to Milne before school starts in September. The checkout and production services will stay in the library. If this move happens, it will be during early to mid September.

The project team is: Andrew, Kirsten, Max, Samuel, Jeff, Richard, Ed. Ping one of us if you have questions or concerns.

I am currently working on the communications plan and CAB request for this change.

Walk-up folks please note: Community Network customers will also be able to bring their OSU-owned computers to the walk-up for assistance, but we will not be promoting this service until later in Fall. For now, if a CN customer comes to the walkup, please DO NOT TURN THEM AWAY. Ask for their ticket number, or look them up in RefTool to find their ticket, and call the 78787 number if you are not sure what to do.

New IS Website

The Information Services website is being redone, and the new one should be going into production either late August or early September.

You can view the dev version of the new IS site here. I am still working with Sher Fenn to update much of our content.

Apps.oregonstate.edu

Citrix XenApp (apps.oregonstate.edu) has replaced RemoteApps. The Service Desk is the tier 1 point-of-contact for all Citrix requests. Escalate issues to the Campus Labs queue in Coho as needed.

The InfoSheet for Citrix is in ITKnows.

The name of this service may change, but for now we seem to be calling it “Citrix” or “Apps”.

OSU-Cascades New Building

The grand opening for Tykeson Hall is September 13. Greg Chilcote and Shannon Osborne were busy last week getting things ready.

With things being very busy in Bend and with OSU-Cascades expanding to more locations, we are encouraging CN customers at OSU-Cascades to call the call center for support rather than arm-grabbing Greg and Shannon for everything. Always make note of where a customer is located when talking to them on the phone. We can send Greg and Shannon to field appointments in Bend just as we do with field techs here in Corvallis. Max C. is working on getting travel time information to assist us with scheduling.

New Email Address for Service Desk

Beginning with promotional events this Fall and with changes to the IS website, I will be promoting a new email address for contacting the Service Desk.

The official contact information for the Service Desk is as follows:

IS Service Desk

Phone: 541-737-8787 (Corvallis/Statewide),  541-322-2051 (OSU-Cascades)

Email: Service.Desk@oregonstate.edu

Walk-up: Valley Library, main floor lobby area (until this changes)

Fall Service Desk Hours

With the move of the walk-up to Milne, we will be syncing up the call center hours with the walk-up. Our fall hours for walk-up and call center will be:

IS Service Desk Hours

Monday-Friday: 8am-7PM

Saturday/Sunday: 3PM-7PM

Team Dynamix Update

We are getting ready to reboot the project to roll Client Services to Team Dynamix, our new ticketing system.

Lucas Friedrichsen will be heading up this effort, with Paul Bunn as the project manager.

I can’t give an exact time frame yet, but if all goes well, we will be migrating the Service Desk from Coho to Team Dynamix in mid-to-late Fall term.

We will address other groups who use Coho after the Service Desk operations have moved.

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Service Desk Digest 7/13/2016

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Please read on for a few important updates and reminders.

Interview

If you aren’t familiar, Interview is the process where we collect important information before taking a computer to the CN build bench. Interview has recently been moved from a stand-alone application to a link within Build Tracker. We are working on getting the link in Coho updated.

interview

When setting the “Reason at Bench” please choose the primary reason this computer is being worked on. This information will be used to help understand what drives our workload.

There have been some issues with interviews for Extension. For now, Ken Howard will be taking the lead on those. Please set Ken as “responsible” on Extension interview tickets.

Scheduling Appointments

When scheduling a placement for a computer at the time of pick-up, please remember to allow 5 business days from the day/time of pick-up to placement. If the computer needs to be done sooner than that, mark it as a “rush” and inform the Bench team.

Also, please remember to send an appointment confirmation from the ticket to the customer using the canned response.

Finally, when scheduling field appointments for locations far outside the core of campus, remember to allow 30 minutes of travel time both before and after the appointment.

Student Time Reporting

Thanks to the efforts of Andrew Wheeler, Chris Sinnett, David Barber, and our colleagues in UABC, all Client Services student workers will now clock their time against a single job in EmpCenter. This should make life a lot easier for all of us and for UABC.

Changes coming this Summer

The ITIL-inspired Service Desk implementation is still under way. The call center merger is complete, and the next steps are to redefine processes for Build Bench, Campus Labs and the Walk-Up.

It is not official yet, but we are working on a plan to move the walk-up to Milne Computer Center by the end of summer (thank you, Andrew!). This will improve collaboration between teams, allow us to more easily provide walk-up services to CN customers, and will provide a reception area for the building. More details on this will be shared as the plan firms up.

As part of the change to support for the labs, we are evaluating adding support via chat. Users in the labs would be encouraged to request help via chat, but we will also provide a phone in the lab that rings the call center, and technicians can be dispatched to help in person as needed. We may also consider putting a chat tool or link to a chat web interface on CN customers’ computers.

Communicating with CN Customers

We have been making a lot of changes lately, and more are planned. We need a standard method to communicate these changes to customers. I will be sending a survey out to CN customers shortly to ask how the call center merger went, and where they would like to see us continue to make improvements. I will also be asking how they prefer to receive notifications from us.

If you have items that you would like to see included in a newsletter to customers, please let me know.

OSU and Information Services Strategic Goals

One of OSU’s stated goals is to improve “student success”; in particular, the university is looking to improve student retention and on-time graduation rates. What role can IT play in improving student success? A huge factor for students deciding to stay with the university is feeling a sense of belonging, of being listened to and cared for. When customers call us with problems – can’t login to Canvas to submit a paper, trying to figure out why their professor isn’t receiving their emails, computer infested with viruses so bad they can barely use it – we have an opportunity to show them that we care and are here to help.

At the same time, you – as student workers – have an opportunity to develop your active listening skills and critical thinking skills – skills that will serve you well in any job and really at any time in life. Learn to empathize. Show you understand what the customer is trying to accomplish, and that you care about them as a person. A 2 minute conversation with someone who is having a bad day could be the difference between whether or not they finish their college education at OSU.

Something Fun

Due to popular demand, I am thinking of starting up a regular game night for Client Services employees. One possibility would be a bi-monthly table top game night or LAN game night. If you have suggestions or would be interested in helping to coordinate something like this, let me know!

Service Desk Stats

Weekly Stats for 7/4/2016-7/8/2016:

  • Calls: 581
  • Abandon rate: 7%, 42 seconds
  • Appointments: 60
  • Computers built: 29
  • Tickets created: 600
  • Cascades jobs: 76
  • Surveys: 32
  • Average survey score: 4.3 out of 5

Know Thy Customer

Our customers are interesting people doing interesting things. For example, the Master Gardener Program is pretty cool, and you can learn about it here:

http://extension.oregonstate.edu/mg/