62 | PROMOTION: STUDENTCOM | EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
PROFILE: ✥ Chris Dent ✥ Six years at StudentCom ✥ 2nd line team Supervisor ✥ Managing the 2nd Line analysts and acting as point of escalation for the StudentCom Service Desk
THE FUTURE OF STUDENT SUPPORT
Chris Dent, team service desk supervisor at StudentCom, tells us how new technologies are changing student support
What do you enjoy most about your job? I’ve always enjoyed fixing a problem someone is experiencing in the space of a phone call. It is immensely satisfying when a customer contacts you feeling frustrated that they can’t get online and you diagnose the problem and resolve it quickly for them. Fix first time and fix fast is our mantra. Technology changes at a
blistering pace nowadays and students are early adopters of new devices, be it phones, tablets or games consoles. I love geting my hands on new tech and having a play with it. It helps me stay one step ahead of our customers, just about!
What is the toughest part of your job? As I said, supporting new technology makes for an
interesting job, but it does have its challenges, especially if you are unfamiliar with the device yourself and the customer has it displaying a language other than English. It can certainly add an extra layer of complexity. Thankfully, our experience of supporting so many student customers over so many years means that we have these sort of scenarios documented in our Knowledge Base and can swiftly access to provide a resolution. Supporting students is seasonal
in nature with volumes of queries rising dramatically in September and October at the start of the academic year. We have worked hard to ensure we meet this demand via additional resource, longer support hours and a range of new communication channels such as Live Chat and Twiter.
How do students prefer to get in touch? In the past year or so, social media has really come to the forefront. More and more customers are choosing to tweet our Service Desk if they are having problems rather than call. For those students for whom
ABOVE: Chris Dent, 2nd line team supervisor at StudentCom
English is not their first language, we offer a range of support guides for them to follow with pictorial explanations. We also have a ‘Live Chat’ facility which allows a customer to contact our analysts via a chat window to seek live support. We are tailoring our service to
meet and exceed the needs of our customers by increasing our hours of cover to deliver 24/7/365 support to our customers. We are encouraging customers to follow our Twiter feed as we regularly post helpful articles on subjects we receive the most frequent questions about.
"MORE AND MORE CUSTOMERS NOW TWEET OUR SERVICE DESK RATHER THAN CALL"
How do you see this changing in the future? I can see a time when social media, be it Twiter, Facebook or something entirely new, handles at least a similar number of queries as the traditional methods of telephone and email. If this does become a reality we will obviously need to review how we share our technical resources between telephony and online support. Currently we handle a much
smaller number of queries from customers outside of our peak hours. Despite our industry leading
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