Faculty frustrated with IT? 3 ways to make them happier

Faculty is one of your institution’s greatest assets. Are you doing everything you can to ensure a better user (IT) experience and give them a reason to stay?

How often do you hear your faculty complain they had an issue while they were teaching a class and it took too long to resolve their problem? Or “The class is starting in 10 min and this projector is not displaying anything on the projector screen. How am I supposed to conduct the class?” or “The microphone just went off in between the session. I need immediate assistance, as my class will not be able to hear what I am teaching them?”

With a comprehensive IT support strategy and constructive tools in place, you can help your faculty be more effective in and outside the classroom. Here is a look at the top 3 ways to sharpen the IT support services:

1. 1. App for Classroom Emergency
      One of the major sources of frustration for Faculty is reporting classroom emergency issues and then getting someone over immediately to resolve the emergency. The agent must follow steps of escalating the ticket to the onsite team, by the time the onsite technical representative picks up the ticket and then follows up, 30 minutes are gone by, and by then the faculty is frustrated to the point of utter disdain. At BlackBetHelp, we have seen this happen repeatedly, so we developed an App that could eliminate this delay. The Classroom Emergency App allows the faculty to reach out to the onsite technician with a tap of a button.
   2. When they call – Know who they are
      While we have addressed the issue of eliminating delay for emergency situations for faculty, it’s imperative that we have a system in place that can instantly identify your faculty users that require the most assistance. This can be done by making use of smart and Intelligent ticketing tools and telephony systems. Imagine a situation wherein your faculty dials your help desk number and the agent on the other side straight away says, Hi Joe, are you in a classroom, and is there an issue? At BlackBeltHelp, we do this by making sure that our agents have the capability of pre-identifying the user and pre-empting the name and the issue. This process is called Automated Number Identification, this entails the VOIP system tightly integrated with the CRM and provides your callers’ details to the agent. This not only reduces the time to identify the user, however, it also allows the agent to assist the user better by getting access to the historical view of the caller’s issues.
   3. Faculty Development
      As such, many educators need to expand their skills in instructional technology to become more effective and innovative integrators of technology into the learning experience. We can help your educators develop their instructional technology skills by taking advantage of our online learning programs. These programs provide the top-tier curriculum and instruction that prepares your faculty to successfully incorporate the use of the latest technology in their sessions:

• • • Instructional Design and Curriculum Development
    • Scholarly Activity including writing, conducting research, presenting at conferences, etc.
    • Leadership, Administration, and Organizational Development
    • Personal and Professional Development

Anything we can do to minimize their frustration helps encourage them to utilize the service of your help desk more and stay happy