When I was in college, I was used to digging up information by myself. I would do everything from multi-staged processes to finding out a book to guide me through my project. But oh! how long it took me to find all the information I should’ve gotten with just a click! It would’ve saved me so much time to get information quickly through a portal or something.
Come to think of it; customer support has never been perceived through the lens of educational institutions. Generally, when someone thinks about customer support, you think about corporate, ecommerce, and stuff. However, the situation is changing as we speak. Nowadays, students can be seen as the new customers. They do have specific needs and demands that need to be fulfilled while they study. In this blog, I will walk you through the twists and turns of customer support in the sector of education and why it is essential.
Customer Support in Education
Students have to juggle multiple roles in a university, school, or other educational institution. They have to undergo complex processes, academic services, administrative functions, requests, etc., that need to function efficiently. Handling these services is neither easy nor cheap.
Educational organizations need to exercise special care while managing them. Academic customer support stands for the optimization of the interaction between students (customers) and a higher educational establishment.
Primary Principles of Ideal Support in Education
A proactive approach and efficient communication must be the primary aspect of support in educational institutions. Effective communication can reduce the student frustration rate, and they can access information quickly.
Why Use a Help Desk Software for Schools
You cannot underestimate the importance of effective software in education. From ad hoc requests to dealing with impatient millennials, a support rep in an educational institute is not easy. After a point, the volume of requests, complaints, password reset requests, and inquiries can get so overwhelming that emails and spreadsheets are not enough to keep up with.
It is challenging to bring together fragmented knowledge, services, and information. This is where helpdesk software comes into the picture. It is a place where you can consolidate all your data and everything involving your support. It includes the IT agents, their performance, faculty/staff members, student data, etc. You can find the information they are looking for instantly and at any time. The helpdesk software becomes the single source of information for all parties involved.
What Can a Help Desk Software For Education Do for You?
IT solutions like help desk software can simplify all the processes of the education system. It can help you with administrative tasks, solving queries related to classes, fees, accommodation, and many more.
Your teams can save a lot of time and take care of repetitive tasks automatically. It leads to increased productivity and efficient workload management. Let’s look at what help desk software can do for your educational institution.
1. A Boon For Administrative Teams
The role of administrative teams or admin leads in educational institutions is crucial. They need to take care of multiple tasks, including (but not limited to) enrolling students, onboarding them, managing classes, managing infrastructure, facilities, and so on.
At the beginning of a new session or semester, administrative teams are buried in work. Besides, the inflow of incoming queries is the most tiring task of all. A support help desk can simplify tasks promptly. Primarily, it can eliminate repetitive work. An ideal help desk can convert queries into tickets, assign them to support agents, and let you categorize them. All this from a single interface.
2. Education Support Portal For Students
Student groups are now more active than ever. Thanks to social media. You can inform students about all the courses, timetables, grades, progress, performance, tests, etc.
They can view their test results and solve queries on their own through self-help options. If the self-service doesn’t offer them the right solution, they can generate queries via tickets. Students can actively engage via forums and have constructive discussions around different topics of interest.
3. Help Desk Brings Everything Together
One of the most significant benefits of a help desk is that it brings everything together in a single interface. There are multiple departments in an educational institution. All departments have a different person to contact if someone faces a query. In this case, institutions usually need to provide each department’s email address or phone number on their website.
Through help desk software, you can set routing rules and categorize your incoming queries. For example, while filling up the query registration form, you can give the dropdown select menu for customers to choose what department they seek help from. Then, you can divert this query automatically to the concerned (selected) department.
4. Advanced Reporting to Make Data-Driven Decisions
Reporting and analytics play a crucial role in decision-making for any industry. Educational organizations also need critical insights into the service they’re providing. Reporting can help increase customer satisfaction. It can help you ensure that the help you set out to provide is correctly reaching your end-users. It also helps you find out if your agents are performing their duties or not. Reporting ensures fair ticket assignment among your support reps. You can see which highlight answers the most tickets, their average response time, efficiency, resolution rate, and so on.
5. Improved User Experience
A help desk software for education is a source of information that anyone can access at any time. It creates a conducive environment for support reps because it gives them one place to address all user issues. Hence, they’re able to work effectively. It eases students’ lives and provides them with a singular source of information that they can approach for any queries and get help.
How to Choose the Right Help Desk Software For Education
Regardless of the medium of communication with students, a help desk will make everything easier. A help desk can assist in managing the student experience through measuring and monitoring student communication with various departments. Some helpdesk features that can help you improve are:
- SLAs: Service level agreements are a crucial part of the help desk software for education. It ensures that everyone responds on time by tracking average first-time response and average resolution time. It also gives you an idea about the gaps in your services so that you can implement effective strategies to improve your response time.
- Satisfaction Surveys: You need follow-up surveys to ensure that everyone is satisfied with the support they receive. Once you have the supporting data, you can quantify it to make data-driven decisions.
- Automation: Automated features like automatic query registration, query assignment, query routing, resolution notifications, chatbots, etc., can help you streamline your redundant tasks. It also saves you support agents time and gets everyone to the right place in the first instance.
- Self-Service: Comprehensive knowledge base or FAQs have always been useful irrespective of the industry they’re used in. A knowledge base helps students find the information they need at their fingertips, even during a 4 AM study session. Students can search for reference information at any time. It saves them the trouble of talking to your admin staff or support reps.
You can consolidate popular queries and the most asked questions into the form of knowledge base articles and save your support agents from repeating it. For example, you can write articles about “how to process the security money return” or “how to access the student portal.”
Students are generally digital natives. They like using online tools and online mediums of communication. A large number of students use social media to research higher education institutions before deciding. So, you better be responding (and with good customer support skills) online! A help desk can do it right for you. It can pull together messages from your social media. You can also link your knowledge base to chatbots to answer questions automatically.
The Bottomline
An educational organization needs to serve its customers (students, patients, etc.) They need to improve communication between students and administrators and can have a lasting impact on the student experience. Customer support for education can make a massive difference in the brand image of a university as well. If you follow the strategies outlined above, you can make your institution known for the best student experience. That sounds like a worthy goal to me!
The key to a good help desk is its processes, planning, and improvement. You can aim to improve with every ticket, and your service levels will shine. As renowned IT professionals, we build products to help educational institutes ace the support that they provide. We have the key to building reliability and trust with your users. Talk to our experts to know more!
