CUSTOMER SERVICE
Teachers as Their Own Best Customer Service Providers
By Renee Ramig
I
n an ideal world, every school would have a help desk with a “real” person available to respond to technology issues. If I am an English teacher and three of the laptops the students are using won’t print, I call the help desk. Someone comes running into my classroom with a red cape and instantly fixes the problem. As school districts find more ways to cut expenses, often technology support is on the chopping block. Rarely does a school have an onsite help desk that can respond to teacher needs when they really need the support. In reality, usually a centralized support team, or in some cases a single person, does its best to support all the schools in the district. The difficulty is that it is not helpful for the above English teacher to get help three days later. The essays were due that day. One way to help with this is to give teachers a set of skills and tools they can use to solve their own problems. These skills and tools need to be very easy and quick to use. The first step to take is to assess what teachers can do with the setup already on the school machines. Are the users local administrators or do they have limited access? Obviously, the skills and tools you give to the teachers need to match the access level they are given. Start by creating troubleshooting steps for the most common tech issues that teachers can solve based on their access level. Post these on a website. Also, use the “old-fashioned” paper-based method, and distribute these pages to teachers. Some of the common issues that teachers often need “immediate” help with are printing, sound and connectivity. Focus on these three areas first unless you have site specific issues that are more critical to address. Create simple how-to sheets. Include lots of screen shots on what things should look like. For example, take screen shots of what an Ethernet cable looks like along with the ports in the computer and wall where it plugs in. Don’t just say, “Make sure the Ethernet cable is firmly connected at both ends.” Another example is to take a picture of continued on page 16
14 DataBus • Spring 2010