Students have to juggle multiple roles in any educational institution. To function efficiently, they have to undergo complex learning processes, administrative functions, academic services, etc. Thus, as an educational organization, you would want to exercise special care while managing them. Here, academic customer support comes to help. It optimizes the interaction between students and admins.
A proactive approach and efficient communication should be the primary aspect of support in educational institutions. Implementing effective communication can reduce the student frustration rate, and help them to access information quickly.
Why You Should Use a Help Desk Software for Schools
One cannot underestimate the importance of effective software in the education industry. From ad hoc requests to impatient millennials, any support task in an educational institute is not easy. Also, there comes a point after which the volume of requests, password reset requests, complaints, and inquiries can get overwhelming. And due to this, spreadsheets and emails are not enough to keep up with. This is where helpdesk software comes to help
Here you can consolidate all your data and everything that concerns your support service. It can include the IT agents, their performance, staff members, student data, etc. The helpdesk software is the single source of information for all parties involved. Let us see what more a help desk software for education can do for your institute:
What Can a Help Desk for Education Do for Your Institute?
- A Boon for Administrative Teams
Administrative teams or admins in educational institutions play a vital role. They need to deal with multiple tasks, like:
- Student enrollment
- Onboarding students
- Managing infrastructure
- Managing classes
- Facilities
At the beginning of a new year or semester, administrative teams are buried under a lot of work. Besides, managing the inflow of incoming queries is the most tiring task of all. Here a support help desk can simplify their tasks promptly by eliminating repetitive work. An ideal help desk converts queries into tickets, assigns them to support agents, and lets you categorize them. Yes, all this from a single interface through the ticket management system.
- Education Support Portal for Students
As we see that student groups are now more active than ever before, thanks to social media. You can inform the students about all the courses, timetables, progress, grades, performance, tests, etc., through the portal itself.
They can even view their test results and solve queries on their own by implementing self-help options. If the self-service does not offer them the right solution, they can generate their queries via an online ticketing system. Additionally, students can actively engage via community forums and have constructive discussions around different topics of interest.
- Access Everything From One Interface
One of the most notable advantages of a help desk is that it brings everything together in a single interface. As we know that there are multiple departments in any educational institution. All departments have a different person of contact if someone faces a query. In such cases, institutions usually have to provide each department’s email address or phone number on their website.
But, with help desk software, you can set routing rules and can categorize your incoming queries. For instance, while filling up the query registration form, you can provide the dropdown select menu for users. Through this, they can choose what department they are seeking help from. Then, you can divert these queries automatically to the concerned department. And the person of contact can answer all the queries then.
- Advanced Reporting to Make Data-Driven Decisions
Reports and analytics play a vital role in decision-making for any industry. Thus, educational organizations also need critical insights into the service they are providing. Reporting helps in increasing customer satisfaction. It can help you to ensure that the help you set out to provide is reaching correctly to your end-users.
It even helps you to find out if your support staff is performing their duties or not. Reporting also ensures fair ticket assignment among your support staff. You can see which agent answers the most tickets, their average response time, resolution rate, efficiency, and so on.
- Improved User Experience
A help desk software for education serves as a source of information that anyone can access at any time. It creates a conducive environment for support staff as it gives them one medium to address all user issues. Hence, they are able to work effectively. It provides students with a singular source of information that they can approach for any sort of queries and get help.
This way, they can study efficiently and can even save time. Admins can include popular queries and the most asked questions in the form of knowledge base articles. This will save your support staff time from repeating the same answers. For example, you can write knowledge base articles about:
- “how to securely process the money return”
- “how to apply for the extracurricular activity”
- “how to access the student portal,” etc.
Students are generally digital natives. They enjoy using online tools and online mediums of communication. Also, a large number of students use social media to research all the information about higher education institutions before deciding on one.
So, make sure your organization is responsive with good customer support skills on online mediums too. Here the help desk can help you by pulling together messages from your social media to one medium. You can even link your knowledge base to chatbots. This way, there will be no need for human interference in answering questions.
The Bottomline
A customer support help desk for education can make a massive difference in your university’s brand image. An educational organization needs to improve and upgrade its communication skills and channels consistently for serving a better experience to:
- Students
- Teachers
- Parents
- Site visitors