Help Desk - the New Face of our Hot Line Service

Horizontal Rule [Sept 97]

Joe Lee

The Hot Line Service was originally established at the end of 1991 as a single point of contact to relax the exaggerated demand on technical support from programmers and technicians. As a single channel for recording technical enquiries on hardware and software, and gathering requests on maintenance work, the Hot Line Service is responsible for answering simple calls, logging problems and distributing incident logs to corresponding parties for resolution. This mode of operation has been maintained for almost seven years. In order to improve the quality of service in this rapidly changing technical environment, the CSC formed a task force to review the operations of the Service in April this year. After three months of study, participation and revision, the task force came up with recommendations for improvement.

Over the years, the kind of services it provides has gradually changed and its name no longer adequately describes the nature of its operation. A more appropriate name, Help Desk, was therefore chosen to reflect its role.

In line with the newly introduced maintenance scheme (please refer to "Revised Charging Scheme for Maintenance & Support Services" on page 11), the Help Desk will continue to provide users with free software consultation service. As users in general would like to resolve their problems immediately over the phone, consultation time needs be lengthened. As a result, the number of servicing staff at the Help Desk has been increased to three, Correspondingly, the number of telephone lines has been increased too. Additional facilities, such as voice mail, email, and a new Help Desk software system (introduced below), are ready for collecting requests or recording problems from users.

The management structure of the Help Desk has also been changed. Starting from September, the newly formed Help Desk will be under the supervision of the Academic Services Section. A senior staff from the section will monitor the work flow of this organisation, generate statistical reports, identify possible improvement areas, and keep on developing the software system to provide quality service.

The old Hot Line application software, which offers only limited features, will be replaced with a full-featured commercial product. After evaluating the many products available on the market, the task force has selected the most suitable package to meet our needs. This software is web-enabled and hence users can submit requests, enquire progress of their requests, review solutions of previous requests, and search for technical solutions from the knowledge-bases through the standard web interface. As such, this software allows us to install commercially available technical knowledge-bases and to build our own databases upon the problem cases collected from users. The Academic Services Section will continue to maintain the knowledge-bases and further develop the system so that users can efficiently retrieve the requested information. When the system is in full operation, all staff members and students will be able to make use of the system to solve most of their daily technical problems. In the second phase of implementation, it is envisaged that the system will be developed to handle the CSC Work Request forms.

As information technologies keep evolving, we expect to face a wide variety of computer devices and a much more complicated computing environment in the near future. The demand for assistance will grow along with this complexity. Looking into the future, the new Help Desk organization equipped with the powerful software system will certainly provide tremendous help to users both in the campus and at home.


[Issue No. 12]


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Computing Services Centre
City University of Hong Kong
ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk

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