Who am I?
You have probably been in touch with me via Help4U or Topdesk for web support.
My background has been in customer service in one way or another. As a travel agent (back in the days before the World Wide Web) I had the opportunity to travel around the world. I lived on three continents – Africa, America, and Europe.
I started at the University of Dundee in the Press Office in 1995. Back then there were only 23,500 websites in existence in the world. We didn’t have a web presence but in 1997 we were given access to create our department websites. This type of work fascinated me.
After a few years of everyone adding “Under Construction” gifs on their homepage, the University hired a Web Administrator. One person to govern the entire University’s web presence!
When it became apparent that more resource was needed to support the website, I joined the Web team part-time. This was to provide support to staff who wanted access to the web servers and MySQL databases. There was no content management system (CMS) in place back then, it was plain HTML. Building tables within tables within tables (for those of you who remember these days), and before Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) became best practice.
A lot has changed since then, including the number of staff now working in the Web Services team.
What do I do in web support?
I manage the Web Support Assistant and the incoming support calls for the Web Services team on Topdesk.
The calls can be anything from fixing WordPress issues to updating your staff profile pages. As well as taking care of customer calls, I purchase domain names for the university community, finance tasks, create SSL certificates, help on web projects, Quality Assurance (QA) testing on new functions in Drupal. I also keep a regular audit of out-of-date WordPress sites, user accounts, and external hosting on Heart Internet and Gecko forms. Training new users on the systems we use, such as Eventbrite and Drupal, is also on my to-do list.
What next?
I am working with Digital and Technology Services to change the way we report calls in Topdesk. We are looking for changes to categories to easily identify what type of requests are coming into Topdesk and set up regular reports.
We are also gathering customer feedback specifically for the Web Operators group. The plan is to have an automated email on closing the call, but this is proving difficult to do in Topdesk. While waiting for this work to be done, we will manually add a link to an online form when we complete your request. Here’s a sneak preview of what the form looks like. There are only two questions and will take less than a minute to complete.
The first question is one click to tell us if you are happy with our service. Give us one rating from Very satisfied to Very dissatisfied.
The second question asks you to tell us why you have chosen that rating. The more information you can provide the better.
We are using the data from the form to learn what we are doing well and what is not working well. We can then improve on the things you would like to see done better.
Look out for the link and tell us how we are doing.