Improve Your Self-Service Portal to Increase Student and Faculty Satisfaction

A recommended first step to improving usability and adoption by students and faculty is to construct and offer a self-service portal. Setting up an easy-to-use self-service portal with a well-designed service catalog and a well-organized knowledge base is a great way to start this journey.  Over the next posts, we will explore the best practices along with the business benefits for designing a self-service portal for educational institutions.

In the education field, IT service desk teams face a host of challenges, as their customers ranges from visitors who only need access to Wi-Fi, to faculty and students who need long-term access to a variety of tools and applications. So, before designing an IT self-service portal, it is vital that IT service desk teams determine who it is that they need to serve.

Typically, IT customers in educational institutions include students, faculty, staff, parents, alumni, and visitors. As technology usage in the educational space has increased, IT has become the integral technology enabler around which students and other’s function, as they rely heavily on its services for everyday functions. Let us take a quick look at the IT self-service portals of three universities along with their respective audiences:

• The University of New Mexico services students, staff, faculty, and visitors.
• The University of Texas System, services the IT provider, staff, faculty, and students.
• The University of Missouri services former employees, hospital employees, parents of students, prospective postdoctoral researchers, prospective students, alums, suppliers, payees, and retirees.

Audience segmentation is based on the structure of the educational institution as well as the processes of the IT service desk team. Once the audience segmentation is complete, the next step is to design an IT or enterprise service management portal that addresses the requirements of each of these segments.

Check back on our next post for the steps in building an effective self-service portal.