A helpdesk is a fundamental service for a university that intends to maintain high operational efficiency and at the same time improve the experience of students and staff. Thanks to a centralized and semi-automated system, it becomes possible to efficiently manage daily support requests, ranging from technical to administrative support. With the minimum use of resources on the part of the institution and time on the part of the students, to quickly find a solution. A customer requested the development of this technology. Here's how it went.
Operating in the university environment, our client has noticed a limited capacity to support students enrolled in the more than 13 departments that make up the university. Every day, the secretariat received thousands of requests to which it was unable to provide an adequate solution in a short time.
The students were therefore forced to wait days before being able to solve both technical and administrative problems, which inevitably led to an increase in general dissatisfaction.
The lack of a system capable of facilitating the support service offered by the university secretariat entailed risks such as:
We have therefore designed together with the customer a simple to use solution, accessible at the main points of contact with students and suitable for managing requests sent every day to 20 secretarial offices without problems, to reduce waiting times.
We based on the customer's request to develop a helpdesk integrated with the Microsoft 365 identity management system, already in use, to create two web apps based on Microsoft Azure.
The first custom web app allows students to create their own tickets, ensuring the privacy of the information and used the data entered to direct the request to the relevant operators. Regarding privacy, it should be noted that tickets are created with native encryption.
The second web app, on the other hand, is used by secretariats to manage incoming tickets, in the shortest possible time. In fact, the system offers intelligent features that simplify operators' activities, thanks to:
The helpdesk also offers functionality for real-time communication, allowing operators to organize meetings on Teams, or even in person, to solve the problem directly with the user.
Always to facilitate communication between students and administrative staff, we have accompanied our solution with a support chatbot integrated into the university's website.
Present on any page and able to provide students with a quick response to the most common problems, the chatbot makes it possible to lighten the workload of secretariats. In the case of extraordinary requests, the chatbot allows you to create a ticket and thus contact the operators.
Once the tickets have been closed, the system finally takes care of:
Obviously, the introduction of a new helpdesk system has entailed some difficulties.
First, the student adoption rate. The concern was that users did not have the necessary information available to understand how to access the new digital service, use the features offered and share their requests with chatbots and operators.
We have therefore inserted a space on the helpdesk home page to promote training through personalized communications and messages, highlighted for maximum reception.
A second challenge concerned the scalability of the system.
It was necessary for the service to be able to manage the thousands of requests sent every day by students from 13 departments, as well as the activities of more than 100 operators in the university secretariats.
Thanks to the solutions offered by Microsoft Azure, we were able to build a solid infrastructure where the distribution of machine resources is optimized. Machine resources are in fact the tools that allow the execution of processes within the system, ensuring fluid, flexible and reliable request management.
Together with the customer, we tracked the performance of the new helpdesk system. The goal was to understand if the solution was really the right one to improve the experience of students and staff in the university's 20 secretarial offices. The answer? Let's see some facts together:
Since the solution was implemented, the university has not yet received any negative feedback from students.
The Infra & Security team focuses on the management and evolution of our customers' Microsoft Azure tenants. Besides configuring and managing these tenants, the team is responsible for creating application deployments through DevOps pipelines. It also monitors and manages all security aspects of the tenants and supports Security Operations Centers (SOC).
