“Just about every group I’ve ever managed ended up being overworked … because the vast majority of the work is redundant, and leads to burnout,” said Verghis, founder of The Verghis Group, a company that helps establish and improve help-desk services. “In higher education, you sometimes end up with five or 10 people trying to support 10,000 people.”
As many as half of the IT support requests on college campuses could be eliminated, industry experts said, if colleges did away with phones and automated their help-desk services instead.
“People calling asking for their passwords—this is absolutely mindless work,” said Jeff Tarter, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Association of Support Professionals, adding that college and university websites should be sophisticated enough for a student to request a password reminder through an automated system. “You need to get to the point where no human being touches [a password request].”
Higher education’s approach to help-desk services is also one of the priciest in the entire support services industry, according to the Bomgard report.
About eight in 10 education respondents said their campus’s help desk provides support to faculty and students who walk up to a help desk and place a request. In-person help, according to the report, is twice as expensive as online chat support and also is pricier than eMail and phone support.
Electronic improvements in help-desk services might be the key to providing more efficient support, Verghis said, but campus technology leaders should realize that even eMail is outmoded for most of today’s college students. Texting and online chatting, he said, better fit students’ taste for immediacy.
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