Today I had the day off for the holiday weekend. While refreshing to not be a slave to my inbox for a day, it gave me a moment to pause and reflect on the last week. Houston, we have a problem.
Yesterday, I noticed a troubling trend among the help desk tickets I received. The problem was many came from different sources. Teachers were emailing us directly, bypassing the help desk. Students were emailing at least two different department email aliases. Even though the messages made it to the correct inboxes, that’s already too many aliases to keep track of. Parents were submitting tickets through the contact form on our website. We had to rely on someone else to forward those messages to us, as we are not direct recipients of that form.
I’m not a betting girl, but I’d hazard there are more tickets I’m not even aware of. The possibility that only my boss got emails for help is high, and vice versa. These are only the inbound problems!
As far as outbound communications go, there’s only one thing I can think of that needs improvement. Sometimes my boss and I forget to CC each other on a thread addressed to only one of us. We’re human, it happens, so I’m not mad about it. As a result though, it makes it harder to track if an issue got solved or not. We do have check-ins to clean up when this happens, but I’d prefer to do away with those.
All this to say, communication to and from our department is a hot mess. Granted, it was messy before I came onto the scene. This last week especially highlighted how disjointed things are.
What can we do? We’re only two people servicing one building of around 800 people, give or take. There’s no need for enterprise grade help desk software for a team this size. Our boss isn’t concerned with who closes how many tickets, so long as problems get resolutions. In that case, do we even need software? Do we focus on optimizing the email system currently in place?
We get to make up whatever processes we want. It’s both a blessing and a curse. In my eyes, a lack of established procedure is what got us into this predicament. The challenge for me is I would have to introduce a new system that’s easy for us to operate and easy for our users to use. On top of that, we’d have to enforce it going forward, which would mean a cultural shift. I’d imagine for some that’d be quite a shock, ha!
The good news is, this would be a great summer project. I have some time to gather more information for a way forward. As far as I’m concerned the current model is not sustainable.
These are just a few preliminary thoughts I wanted to get out there. If I don’t document it somewhere, I will forget. There will be more to follow, I’m sure.
Has anyone else found themselves in a similar situation? I’d be very interested to hear how others solved this dilemma!
