ACCS2019

In this session, we will talk about how VCU Technology Services sponsors a committee of students each academic year that advises Technology Services in matters related to service design and implementation, programming, and promotion of technology at VCU. In the five years of its existence, we have gained valuable insight and feedback on various services we provide. We will also discuss some of the successes and failures in other aspects of the committee. We would also like to talk and hear from others how they involve students in service improvement, decision making, and promotion.

Our team's IT support call center for the university has gone through a multi decade evolution in order to arrive where we are today. In the summer and fall of 2018 the long term vision of having a "primary point of contact group for Information Technology Assistance" was made a reality. Although the team known as 4Help had existed for some time, at this point it now fully combined 3 different teams into one. In doing so it now found itself with with multiple supervisors, a decentralized training team, no dedicated QA department, and years of tribal knowledge. Our agents faced uncertainty of where we were headed and it was incumbent of the leadership team to show the way forward.



This presentation will show how a combined standardization of communication, training and quality assurance can result in an employee experience that is not only positive but also measurable. The leadership team worked hard to become unified in how we communicate, train, and verify the work performed. With the entire team now operating with clear standards of excellence, everyone knows what our goals are, how we can only get there together, and most importantly why we do what we do in the first place.



We will share our best practices on how our communication methods, our training process, and quality assurance fit together like a jigsaw puzzle to form a picture of user & employee satisfaction.

The Academic Website Support team at ODU will talk about how we were able to change the perspective of website support by building (and re-building) relationships with the academic units and managing their website content. We will talk thru how the team started, the strategies we found successful as well as the challenges we faced as we sought to engage and actively manage academic web content.

In this session, we will share how Virginia Tech's IT Help Desk (4Help) goes Beyond All Limits to anticipate and prepare for interruption of 4Help computing support services due to an emergency situation or hazardous condition that prohibits employees from accessing the building or room where they are located. Specifically, we will focus on how 4Help prepares to relocate for events that would cause the building that houses the Help Desk to be unsafe, dangerous, or unsuitable to inhabit or hazardous conditions that make travel to the work location dangerous for employees. The Help Desk proudly serves as first contact for Virginia Tech Alumni, employees, retirees, students, and potential students who have computing support needs and actively considers ways to limit or eliminate any delay or interruption in the service.

This year, Radford University Technology Support Services formed a Ticket Triage Team to clean up the loose ends in our ticketing system and identity opportunities to improve incident and request management. The team uses several tools to root out tickets that never close in a timely fashion, analyze the effectiveness of automated processes, and find patterns of miscommunication between departments. Our efforts have led to changes in the system, meetings between managers, and a significant reduction in tickets relegated to the " I forgot that was open" pile. Join us to hear more about how we got started, what we have discovered, and how we got to work on making meaningful changes to our ITSM system.

I am interested in presenting this as a regular presentation or possibly as a BoF if we have enough parties with similar interest.

Proposal:
Many people believe that customer service is a trait you are born with and this may be partly true that great customer service skills come naturally to some people, however, it is also true that customer service and etiquette can also be taught. When training a technical help desk the focus is placed on training troubleshooting, procedures to fix issues, as well as understanding systems and problems. This training team realizes the importance of also teaching etiquette when dealing with users through various communication media. We must ensure that the importance of good customer service does not get lost in the need to fix the problem whether we are with the person face to face, on the phone, through email communication, or chat. Join us in this session to learn how our training team went Beyond All Limits to create training that encourages good etiquette practices as we assist our users.

Migrating systems can be tough; especially when your old system is nearly a decade old. VCU Development & Alumni Relations' IT team shares their trials and tribulations of selecting JIRA Service Desk and Software as a new service desk platform to replace their retired and unsupported FogBugz Help Desk client. We will cover the technical implementation, going over obstacles and successes experienced as well as the project implementation and user acceptance testing phases of the project. Following presentation, we will have a Q&A for folks interested in our migration or setting up a Help Desk or Service Desk solution of their own.

The technology we use on campus has become increasingly more innovative, the classroom more accessible, e-learning a focal point for new IT initiatives, and service downtime expectations minimal as 'immediacy' has become the new norm -- all these factors have become the driving force for reinventing the customer service experience. Thus, how have you prepared your staff to ensure customer service excellence with every interaction? Have you redesigned your training and onboarding procedures? Do you prioritize customer satisfaction surveys? What do you do to develop the employee who needs to be customer focused and technologically savvy? How do you measure customer expectations and do you keep your staff accountable to this KPI? This Birds-of-a-Feather will allow us to brainstorm together, learn from each other, and perhaps spark new ideas for enhancing the customer service experience!

Jamf is a product that helps enterprise environments be successful with Apple products.

This presentation will take the audience through George Mason's experience of migrating from on-premises to Jamf Cloud. 

We will cover the backstory and past business problems, the migration process, what changed in regards to working in the cloud, lessons learned, how we use the product now, all the security benefits, and a sneak peak at what is ahead for supporting Apple devices in the enterprise/higher education environment.

Topic: Implementing Data-Driven Decisions for Staffing during Anticipated Peak Periods

The situation: the dreaded impending Fall Rush 2018, understaffed (down by two staff members), worry running out of control, panic rising!

The (unlikely [but totally makes sense]) hero: Data

If your employees are wishing to be abducted by aliens, get lost at sea, or anything else to get away from the service desk, data can help make your office a happier place. Join us for a discussion about tackling high volume peaks, improving employee attitudes, and implementation of data-driven decision making and staffing. Fall Rush, once a dreaded time among our service desk employees, became a time of celebration and collaboration.

Most importantly, if you want to make your service desk employees happier, we have some real world ideas you can implement (and ways you can measure your success).