Higher Education Support

How do you provide IT help desk support to a national university system that consists of multiple faculties, spread over a huge campus footprint with 47,000 students, faculty, and staff, very carefully!

Delivering help desk support to institutions of higher education is incredibly demanding. These organizations are complex, and the needs of their users range from the mundane to the extraordinary.

How Higher-Education Service Desks Are Different

Whether it’s that national university system we mentioned earlier or a community college network or a world-famous school or university, institutions of higher education have a higher bar when it comes to their service desk. Here are some of the many elements that can make providing IT support tricky.

Distributed classrooms

Universities have physical classrooms, usually numbering in the hundreds, all with their own level of wired or wireless access to campus networks. They also offer e-learning, with all the demands on bandwidth, server availability and resources associated with streaming live lectures.

Enterprise resource planning

Universities have multiple buildings, vehicle fleets, labs and sometimes even manufacturing facilities scattered across a large campus (or campuses). Some universities also have a teaching hospital or medical facility attached, with all the complexities that these facilities present in terms of hardware, software, security, and regulatory compliance. This makes effective enterprise resource planning vital.

Professional and personal support

Most business service desks never have to help a user troubleshoot their Xbox connection, but plenty of universities and colleges do. They help their students with all manner of technical issues, some related to accessing campus and class resources, and others related to using personal devices while on campus.

Student workers

Higher education tends to use a lot of student labour. These engagements include part-time jobs, co-op placements, internships, and teaching assistant positions. Students start and stop their employment at various times throughout the year. Turnover is often high. Managing the systems that manage these student workers takes time and expertise.

Scaling resources

University service desks also experience massive swings in the volume of help desk requests. The start of every school year, for example, sees a massive spike in requests for support. These spikes may be predictable, but scaling the human and technology resources needed to meet these increased volumes is difficult. Service desk technicians who are busy from January to March may be underutilized once term commences.

Urgency

The difference between uploading an exam paper and not uploading that exam paper can be the difference between graduating or not graduating, between getting a mark of A versus getting a D, between earning a Ph.D. versus earning nothing. Technology resources at universities create their own special sense of urgency (and expense) when they don’t work as intended.

Diverse user population

Institutions of higher education serve multiple user populations, each one with a unique set of needs. You have undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, administrative staff, alumni, donors, board members and so on. Each group requires its own level of support. Some universities provide email to their alumni, for example, while other universities provide full systems and support, such as job boards.

Generational divide

Tech-savvy Gen-Zers in their first year require next to no hand holding when it comes to setting up their computers and accessing campus resources. But alumni or staff who are much older often do. This generational divide also manifests itself in community colleges and other institutions that offer training to adults. Many of the students in these programs these days are farmers, miners, and other blue-collar workers – some may have never booted up a computer in their lives.

Outsource part (or all of) your service desk

One of the greatest advantages of partnering with an outsourced service desk company is scalability. Some large university systems average 5,000 tickets a month, but this volume quadruples during the first few weeks of the school year. If your service desk cannot manage massive and rapid spikes like this, outsourced service desks can. We have the agents and infrastructure in place to help you scale your support seamlessly throughout the year.

Supporting the IT needs of users in a higher-education setting requires higher than normal abilities. You must be prepared for a wide range of support queries, massive spikes and drops in call volumes during the school year, and the challenges of managing technology, networks and systems scattered across hundreds or thousands of locations.