Thursday, October 18, 2012

Judson ISD Connect Mobile App Takes the Bronze Lovie Award



Yesterday we received notification that the Judson ISD Connect! mobile school app for Android and iOS received a Bronze award in the European Lovie Awards.  I am so very proud of my co-workers who worked very hard to make this app what it is.  I am also most appreciative of Conduit Mobile and their fantastic team who worked with us to make the app better and resolve issues to make the app what it is today. More info on the app is available at the app page at http://www.judsonisd.org/district/technology/jisd_mobile.cfm or read about our development experience here in the CTO Technotes blog via Tech & Learning Magazine.




Tuesday, October 16, 2012

We closed another work order, but does anyone know if the customer's happy?


With school budgets being filleted and diced year after year, many school districts’ IT departments have spent a lot of time trimming fat, cutting products, and squeezing budgets and employees for efficiency. One of the big dangers of all this cutting is that we will lose sight of the end goal—keeping our customers happy.
 
This year in our IT department we wanted to step back and look at how our customers perceived our day-to-day work. So we embarked on creating a simple tool to measure how well we were doing for every work order we completed. Every day, we send surveys to customers when their work orders are closed. The survey simply asks customers if their problem was solved and five questions about our service.
 
 An interesting by product of this measurement is that we now have a way to identify customers who had a bad experience, and we can try to go back and work on making the issue right or reopen a work order if their problem was not solved to their satisfaction the first time around.
 
Each weekend, all help desk technicians (all of our IT staff) get a report showing how they did for the week. They also get a list of free-form comments left by customers, both happy and unhappy. Additionally, each staff member also gets to see where they rank in relation to their colleagues. The openness of this data has certainly caused many of us to step back and think about how we are interacting with those we serve. It may be simple courtesies while on the phone or writing out our work-order solutions with correct grammar in complete sentences, but either way the end result should be a better customer experience. 
 
In the end, paying attention to the many details is what builds a great team and great customer service, which we do not want to sacrifice, even in the name of efficiency in lean times.

This blog is cross posted with SchoolCIO at http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&EntryId=4981