Tag Archives: extension

Service Desk Digest 9/2/2016

Box

Reminder: the Box soft launch is September 7, 2016. Students and employees will be receiving emails about the launch, and may follow up with us if they have questions.


New CN Customers: AABC and Cultural Centers

We are in the process of on-boarding some new customers in AABC and the Cultural Centers to Community Network service. Their current DCA is Guy Boulanger, and the projects team are working with him on the transition of admin privileges.

A local admin password for the AABC computers can be found in KeePass (search for “AABC”). Also, all CN field techs and Client Services full-time staff have access to zone.mu in Cyder now.

Until on-boarding is complete: If you get a request from an AABC or Cultural Center customer, do your best to help them. If you run into permissions or access issues that prevent assisting the customer, please let me know.

More information to come.


Know Thy Customer

You can learn about the County Extension sites by visiting http://extension.oregonstate.edu.

Baker County Extension is located in Baker City, in the North-East corner of the state. There are 6 Community Network customers at the site. Carole Smith is the regional administrator, and Jayne Kellar is the office manager and CN LRP.  In the past year, we have had 38 tickets from Baker County Extension.

Learn more about Baker County Extension on their website.

beef-barn


Customer Service Tips

A few customers have complained recently about being kept on hold for a long time, or being put on hold without being told first. Please remember to treat customers as you would like to be treated: tell them when you are going to put them on hold and ask if that is okay. If you are going to be more than a couple of minutes, tell them that. They may want to ask you to call them back later instead. They may not want to be stuck on the phone for a long time while you research a problem.

Related: you should exhaust all resources you can to solve a problem or answer a question, BUT it is also okay to tell the customer you or another tech will get back to them later. If you are completely lost and can’t find any documentation or someone who knows what to do, the problem needs to be escalated to the call mentor on duty, to Max Cohen, or to another full time tech.


Labor Day

Monday is a holiday. The university is closed. Don’t come to work!


Metrics and Feedback

I haven’t had time to put metrics together lately. Also, I’ve had a bit of a rethink about what I want to collect and report on. So, no metrics for you all this time, but I would like to share the following customer survey comments from this week:

“Had to spend some time to figure out what was wrong. Was very polite and finally able to fix the problem and get it fixed.”

“Job well done. Tech had excellent patience and was not in a hurry to get through my requests.”

“talk a little louder, hard to hear you sometimes”

“Problem got fixed in a timely matter.”

“Russ Born was very patient with this vexing problem and he didn’t give up until it was fixed.”

“It was a simple fix but really helpful to have your service readily available.”

“Very quick response and solution!”

“The technician who helped me was wonderful but it took over 2 weeks for a response from the folks that they refered me to. This posed some inconvenience for my job. But I want to reiterate., the technician who initially helped me and continued to follow up with me once you outsourced by issue was wonderful!”

“Vu was fast and knowledgeable. He solved the problem.”

“Excellent assistance and he gave me a different option to use – very friendly!”

“Steven was awesome. He was very thorough and made sure all was well before he left. He also gave me a few tips unrelated that will save me time in future. Thanks a million!!!”

“They resolved the issue that our entire class was experiencing in an expedited fashion”

“Max Cohen and his team went out of their way to accommodate our time critical and complicated requests. As a result, our out of state employees are well equipped for another year recruiting the next class for OSU.”

“Give Josh 2 hours paid lunch every day and a 15% pay increase. He’s the man.”

“It would be helpful if they would have let me know they were going to put me on hold.”

“Was able to get the problem fixed.”

“Great Job!!!”

“I am very impressed with Kirsten Petersen’s attention to my computer issues. In this case, she was responsible for Jon Dowd contacting me. Jon explained wonderfully what was going on and gave me a few solutions. I now understand something that had been bugging me for a while. Thank you very much, Jon and Kirsten.” (Gosh, I never get one of these!)

“Wonderful! Came to my office quickly ( as the issue could not be resolved over the phone).”

“Many Thanks!!!!”

“He was very patient with me”

“No suggestions – the tech was helpful as always!”

“No suggestions – the techs ROCK!”

“THANKS!!!!”

“He was courteous and knowledgeable”

“I appreciated getting a very speedy resolution to my issue as I had to be on an important business meeting via google-hangouts and the technician made sure my equipement was set up properly.”

“Thank you!”

“My issue was resolved very quickly. Thanks!”

Service Desk Digest 7/21/2016

Box

I am working on getting Service Desk technicians access to Box so that you can see what it looks like before it is implemented to campus in the Fall. More on this soon.

The Box community site provides a great deal of user-friendly documentation.  Jade is currently working on an end-user HelpDoc, and we will be documenting some known issues soon.


Interviews for Extension Customers

In an effort to improve consistency, Ken Howard will be handling all computer interviews for Extension and AES customers for now. Lisa Gillis will assign the tickets to Ken.

If you see an Extension/AES interview ticket in the queue, please do the following:

  • Set Ken Howard as Responsible
  • Set the status to “In progress”
  • Set the target date out 2 business days

If an Extension/AES customer calls in for an interview, please complete the interview via Build Tracker and then assign the ticket to Ken per the above.


Changes coming this Summer

Some of you may have heard about some organizational changes that our director Andrew Wheeler announced at the managers meeting this week. All full-time staff were invited although not quite everyone was able to attend. For student workers, this should not impact you greatly, but I encourage you to talk to your supervisor or manager if you have any concerns.

The intent of these changes is to help clarify roles within the Service Desk.

As a reminder, when we are done implementing the Service Desk, the following will be true:

  • We will have a single phone/email point-of-contact for all services provided by Client Services (mostly done).
  • Everyone will be able to get support at the walk-up, including Community Network customers with OSU machines.
  • We will likely share tools for imaging machines.
  • All students will clock hours against a single job.
  • We will share one set of training materials and documentation.
  • We will provide excellent service to our customers!

Communicating with CN customers

The customer survey went out today. I will close it on Tuesday, July 26, and should be able to include some results in the next issue of this digest.


Employee Satisfaction Survey

I sent a survey out to everyone currently working Call Center, Field and Bench. I am not quite ready to share the results of that survey, but I will do so soon. Thank you again to everyone who took the time to provide feedback.


Something Fun

I would still like to start up a weekly or bi-monthly game night, but I need a volunteer to help coordinate. Maybe we should make Jeff do it? He’s cheerful, right?


Service Desk Stats

Weekly Stats for 7/11/2016-7/15/2016

  • Inbound Calls: 635
  • Outbound Calls: 178
  • Appointments: 78
  • Computers built: 36
  • Tickets created: 661
  • Tickets processed same day: 76%
  • Cascades jobs: 103
  • Surveys: 31
  • Average survey score: 4.7 out of 5

Know Thy Customer

Dr. Janine Trempy has been appointed the Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. Dr. Trempy is a professor in the Microbiology department and has been at OSU for 27 years. You can read about some of her research in Terra.

 

Service Desk Digest 7/13/2016

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/

 

 

Call Center Digest – 6/8/2016

Some quick updates pertinent to the call center.


OSU Cascades

Did you know that OSU has a branch campus in Bend, Oregon called “OSU Cascades”?

The most common criticism from OSU Cascades customers is that when they call, we don’t seem to know who or where they are. All employees and students at OSU Cascades are our customers, and we have staff on-site in Bend to assist with desk-side visits. (They are Greg Chilcote and Shannon Osborne.)

 

Please see the OSU Cascades site to learn more. There will be a quiz later.


County Extension Offices and Ag Experiment Stations

Did you know that we have different processes in place for supporting the County Extension Offices and Ag Experiment Stations (AES)? We do not generally have the option to do desk-side visits for these remote customers, so most support is via phone and ScreenConnect sessions.

Lisa Gillis does purchasing for Extension and AES, and customers should be advised to work with her directly on all drop-off and pick-up arrangements. Lisa also does recommendations and e-quotes for Extension and AES.

Wayne Jardine does network troubleshooting for these remote sites. We can also report network outages directly to NERO at noc@nero.net.  Known NERO outages are posted on their website.

More documentation on Extension support workflows coming to ITKnows soon.


Box

The Box pilot went live June 1, and testers are being instructed to contact the Service Desk for tier 1 support. Issues we cannot resolve should be escalated to Steve Fowler; set him responsible, inform him on the ticket and leave the ticket in the OSU Computer Helpdesk queue.

There are 71 test users in the Box pilot at this time. Most questions have been about basic usage and policy. The Box implementation team is not adding new testers at this time.

Infosheet for Box in ITKnows


MediaSpace/Kaltura

Usage of MediaSpace/Kaltura has increased dramatically since its integration with Canvas. Tier 1 requests will come to the Service Desk, but as this is a complex application, we will only be able to answer basic questions. Escalations go to streaming@lists.oregonstate.edu. Please use the “Media Space” template in template hub.

Infosheet for MediaSpace/Kaltura


Important fact of the day:

This Saturday, OSU will graduate a record-breaking number of students: 6,406 people.  Roughly 10% of those students are distance students. OSU is still one of the few large universities to hand an individual diploma to each graduate as they cross the stage. That’s really, really cool.