We've been over this before!: tracking the lifecycles of scheduled events

One of the greatest struggles for our Help Desk was handling regularly scheduled events like account deactivations or the distribution of financial aid letters. Year after year slightly different versions of these events caught us off guard causing confusion amongst the staff which in turn led to poor customer service. We were exclusively reactive to these situations. Our responses were not standard and would pass without a proper dissection of how the event should be handled in the future.

A series of events made us realize that a passive reaction could not be our action plan. The Help Desk got slammed with a variety of issues that we had seen before, but yet we couldn't respond in a quick and consistent way. We didn't have documentation that recalled all the actions we previously took. We needed to come up with a way to track these events so that we could keep ourselves and our colleagues aware of events and figure out how to deal with issues before they hit the Help Desk.

The Lifecycle and Problem Tracker was our solution to this problem. Using our campus wiki, we devised a series of templates and a calendar that would allow us to track re-occurring events. Liaisons were assigned to these events and departments so that we could meet with various stakeholders before an event happened to ensure that the information we gave our customers was accurate. Templates allowed us to keep canned text and knowledgebase solutions in a single location to make deploying them a snap. We could also track unexpected issues and keep ticket counts and follow-up conversations so they could be easily accessed in the future or used in a post mortem.

This system has allowed us to be agile, responsive, transparent and generally less frustrated with issues that shouldn't be causing us or our customers any stress.