Assisting a Student with Technical Issues: A Customer Service Scenario

Steps to Address the Student's Concerns

You are a level 1 technical support specialist at an online university. You begin your day by logging into your IT Service Management software. You see that there are a few tickets that came in during the night when there is nobody staffed. You also notice that there is a new voicemail in the queue. A student named Randall has called and reported his dissatisfaction with the school’s online classrooms being offline for scheduled maintenance, which happens every Sunday from 3:00am – 7:00am. The message was left at 5:50am.  He is threatening to not pay his tuition or transfer to another school if he does not receive any feedback. 

After listening to the message a couple of times, it is clear that the underlying issue is not the online campus being down for maintenance, but rather, his inability to get his advisor’s attention. What Randall really wants is to be heard and to know that he is a valued student at the school. According to the voicemail, the academic advisor has not returned any of Randall’s phone calls or emails. His advisor’s name is Michael North.
Your role in this assignment is to answer the questions below and come up with a series of steps to follow that will allow you to assist Randall and get him connected to his advisor. Below is some information on the other people you are working with who you may need to involve in this process. 

The level 2 support specialist on duty today is named Brad Wagner.
The level 3 support specialist on duty today is named Jeff Ercoli.
The manager of the technical support department is Lance Wilson.
Academic advisor for Randall is Michael North.

After reading the scenario above, use this document to answer the questions below. Submit your completed files to the “Comprehensive Customer Satisfaction – In-class lab scenario” link in Blackboard.

1. Write 3-5 paragraphs discussing the steps you would take to address the student’s concerns. What is the first thing you would do in this scenario? Would you discuss this with a level 2 support specialist first? Would you speak with anyone else, such as a department manager?

2.Write a paragraph describing what methods of communication you would use to contact the student. Would you send an email, create a ticket in the incident management system, call the student directly, a combination of these?

3.Write 2 paragraphs describing what information you would need to know before calling the student on the phone so that you have as much information as you believe you need in order to be prepared to answer the student’s questions. (There are a lot of departments involved in this scenario; web development, academic advising, administration, etc.)

4.You are aware that the university performs scheduled maintenance every week at the same time and that this maintenance is beyond the control of the technical support department. The maintenance schedule is determined by the web development team. Would you create a ticket for this issue and send it to the web development team? Why or why not?

5.You decide that you are going to send an email to the student. Please write an email response to address the student’s issue. Be detailed in your email and include the names of persons who you think should be aware of this situation.