If you are an IT administrator at a school, college, or any other educational institution, tell me if any of the following circumstances ring true for you:
- Your cell phone is vibrating all the time.
- Your email inbox is flooded with unattended emails.
- Your phone system usually crashes because of too many voicemails.
- People randomly pop into your office when they need something and interrupt your work.
One thing about help is that everyone needs it—even you.
The IT department or the admin department of an educational institution demands employees wearing multiple hats. There are so many tasks to be taken care of:
- Overseeing the servers
- Managing the networks
- Updating technology
- And of course, managing the sparkling support service
This is exactly where a well thought helpdesk comes into the picture. If done right, helpdesks for education can really add some value to your organization. Having a helpdesk for education lets the end-user get all the queries answered and track the information they need. It also helps maintain a smooth functionality pace within the institution.
Helpdesk For Education: More Like Helpdesk For Sanity
The ideal way to go about this is to do it without losing your sanity. Undefined boundaries can become damaging for your team and eventually for your end-users too. Without a definition of what to expect and when causes tension. When your support staff faces the pressure of end-users who want everything right now, and your end-users have no guideline of what to expect, the modus operandi often is the “squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
You do not want your users to get conditioned and learn that they get results when they push harder. Do you want to receive calls every 10 minutes about some of the other queries that they’ve submitted through email? I wouldn’t want that. I have a clear set of rules for my team and our users to follow. Every group will have different needs and expectations. A helpdesk will help you keep sane while you get through this!
Key Reasons Why You Need Helpdesk Software For Education
Below are some of the primary reasons why you must consider implementing helpdesk support at your organization.
1. Support And Relationship
Having a helpdesk is excellent if you’re aiming to understand the needs of your end-users. It assures that your end-users can rely on you for answers and that you’re just a call/message/email away. Helpdesks will help you resolve a large number of queries in an organized manner and that too instantly.
2. Grow and Recruit
When users rely on you, you get an idea of their needs and expectations. The more you engage with them, the more feedback you get from them, the more you understand what they desire from you. Understanding these aspects will help you grow and cover a large area of prospects.
3. Visibility
Helpdesk software for education provides you with better visibility in the sense that it enables you to look forward to:
- What more you can do
- Which other areas you can expand into
- Where else do you need to pull your socks up
- What else you can do to stand out.
4. Helps in Better Functioning
This is the best thing about having helpdesk software for education. It makes things easier. Working within the institution can get channelized for anything and everything. Helpdesks can help you connect the right people for any issue or work, and you can easily address the issue without having to reach multiple people. It makes your support streamlined and straightforward.
5. Making Administration Tech-Friendly
With tech tools making their way in the education sector, small technical glitches are of common occurrence. In such cases, it is essential that organizations have helpdesk support, so that problem of every educator is addressed easily and instantly.
Besides this, the IT departments also have infrastructural needs that must be taken care of. This can be maintained and kept a log of through an effective and centralized communication system. And a helpdesk software for education can provide you just this!
6. Communication Through Various Channels
Educational organizations have a growing need to manage their communication and keep them as transparent as possible. The availability of a helpdesk can help achieve well laid-down communication between staff, students, and administration. Helpdesk software for education enables clearer communication between multiple departments within the institution.
7. Overcoming Security Challenges
Educational organizations handle a large number of sensitive data entires. Be it the data of students, staff, or administrative data, having a helpdesk is integral to identifying risk as quickly as possible. It enables and ensures that incidents and problems that create security issues are dealt with efficiently.
Organize On The Go With DeskXpand
Make it easy for your staff and administrators to manage activities and inquiries. With a robust helpdesk, your teams can collaborate, organize and get work done fast.
Helpdesk For Education: Feature Analysis
The IT and Administration team are the backbone of an educational institution. These teams constantly work behind the scenes to ensure that it functions smoothly. They work towards the maintenance of IT infrastructure too. When students and staff have a problem with IT equipment or services, it is the IT team that comes to the rescue. Admin teams oversee operations within their department, coordinate between different teams, and plan according to the organization’s needs.
In 2022, due to the overwhelming nature of remote support and query management, having the right features in your helpdesk software becomes crucial. Here are some must-have features of a helpdesk for education.
1. Streamline customer inquiries
Admin and IT teams at many educational organizations receive queries through multiple channels, viz. email, phone, chatbots (if you have integrated one), and so on. In order to keep track of every pending request, institutions have to spend a lot of time and effort. With a helpdesk, teams don’t have to spend excessive time organizing stuff. They can simply manage these queries in the form of tickets through a customizable inbox and can easily keep track of the pending queries; they all can be automatically categorized and sorted based on priority.
2. Service Level Agreements
SLAs are an important part of the helpdesk software for education. It ensures that everyone responds on time. It helps you track the average first-time response and average resolution time. Besides, it helps you get an idea about the gaps in your services and can further implement effective strategies to improve overall response time.
3. Automation To Save Time From Repetitive Work
Your helpdesk automation must be able to scan through every single task at hand. It will help you categorize and update your queries automatically. The support staff’s efforts will only be required when they really need to engage their skill to solve an issue. Some automation features include:
- Automatic query registration
- Query assignment
- Query routing
- Resolution updates
- Notification and alerts
- Chatbots
4. Self-Service Knowledge Base
Knowledge base articles have always been useful irrespective of the industry they’re used in. A knowledge base helps students find the information they need during, say, a 4 AM study session. Through self-help features, students can search for reference information at any time.
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.”
5. Student Forums
Educational organizations have student groups that work towards common goals. They share common interests or have members from similar backgrounds. Besides, in 2022 with the growth of social media usage amongst students, student groups are now more active ever. With a helpdesk, they can organize campaigns and keep members engaged. They can have constructive conversations around various topics, initiate ideas based on popularity, and make announcements to members of the forum seamlessly.
The Bottomline
The support department of an educational institution needs to serve students, teachers, etc. They need to bridge the communication gaps between students and the administrative departments to have a lasting impact on the student experience. Helpdesk for education can make a massive difference in the brand image of your organization. If you follow the feature list outlined above, you can make your organization known to provide the best support experience to your students and staff. That sounds like a worthy goal to me!
The key to a good helpdesk for education is its processes, planning, development, 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 administrative support. We have the key to building reliability and trust with your users. Talk to our experts to know more!
