We often tell website maintainers that if they are looking for help they should contact the service desk. Have you ever wondered the purpose is in to creating a middleperson between you and Web Services? It seems counterintuitive to make a request go through more stages rather than fewer. But there is some very rational reasoning behind this (I promise!).
Contacting one person
It may seem most efficient to contact, either by phone or e-mail, someone from the Web Services Team you know personally because you already have their contact information. However, this can backfire depending on how busy that individual is! If you leave a voice-mail message or send an e-mail, there is a good chance that the time it takes for follow up on your request will be much longer than if you were to contact the service desk. Consider also that requests can easily get lost among other communications… If everyone personally e-mails one or two Web specialists their website requests, you can imagine the difficulty those one or two people would have cleaning out their inboxes. After all, we have over 1,000 clients! Most importantly, if you message an individual and that individual is away sick, your request languishes in their inbox, unseen by anybody, alone, frightened.
What the Service Desk contributes
For this reason, the ITS Service Desk is really essential to both you and us. Sometimes your request lies outside of our Web Services’ territory. In that case, the folks at ITS Service Desk will know to whom they should pass on your issue so that it gets handled. When they decide who it should go to us, though, they will send it to our entire team. Rather than depending on an individual to provide you with the support you need at his or her own convenience, our whole team will receive your request as a task to be assigned and completed, thus keeping all of us accountable to you.
Wait, so what happens?
Let’s say you email the ITS Service Desk to tell them that you are having difficulty editing a piece of content on your website. That email is now in the ITS Service Desk inbox. The Service Desk Analysts review the inbox continuously and will copy the content of your email into a ticket. This is a unique record of your problem or request that is stored in an application called a customer service manager (CSM – at present ITS uses a CSM called Jira). They also assign it to a department within ITS. Anything which is deemed to be web related is assigned to Web Services.
We are continuously logged into Jira, so when a request for support comes in eight pairs of eyes see it. Whoever is a) most suited and b) available then claims the task for themselves and marks it as ‘In Progress’. Once they complete the work, they communicate this to you, the client, by detailing what they have done in the ticket. They close the ticket, which triggers the CSM to email you the message they have written in the ticket (and they will also often email you the same message). All this also means there is a record so you can query what is happening by calling the Service Desk (just not right now because they are really busy at this time of year).
Request Support
Now you know why we want you to do it, and here is how: fill out a request form here or make use of the new ITS Customer Service Portal.
Why contact the service desk? In short, because it means efficient and effective service for you. So next time, please take a moment to fill out the support request, ensuring the right people see your request and respond.
Thanks!