Bath Spa University

Relaunching The Self Service Portal

When Bath Spa University launched the TOPdesk Self Service Portal (SSP) 6 years ago, it was primarily used by IT Services. After only 38% of survey respondents expressed confidence in using the SSP, the team – Joanna Daggar, Change and Transition Manager and Sean Taylor, Service Quality Analyst – decided to review their implementation.

They conducted research to understand their userbase by gathering usage analytics data, user feedback and industry best practices to ensure their portal would be more intuitive and accessible. The summary of the user feedback was that users were unable to find the content they needed in the way in which they wanted to find it which resulted in frustration. This resulted in limited user engagement, poor optimisation of the platform, and hesitation from other teams within the University to onboard on to the SSP (leading to fragmenting of the support channels of the University and a poor user experience).

They knew that TOPdesk could work for them, as 23% of the Higher Education Industry within the UK was serviced by TOPdesk; speaking to those Universities, the team felt confident they could make the most of the SSP and satisfy the needs of their userbase.

The First Step

As they were receiving feedback on the same recurring topics at regular intervals, Joanna’s team wanted to take responsibility for the design of the new SSP with a focus on being intuitive, accessible, and ensuring the user was able to access the right information quickly and easily.

They put together a proposal using data from their existing SSP, feedback from their userbase and industry best practice research findings for a data-driven design approach. Furthermore, they created a ‘change champions’ network across multiple departments, which involved all departments in the decision-making process, providing ownership over the redesign.

Some of the things they wanted to implement when re-launching their TOPdesk SSP were:

• Encouraging self service
• Consolidating support channels by onboarding new departments and implementing digital transformation; to do this they needed buy in from other departments, and improve the internal optics of the SSP
• Address the issue of choice paralysis, by reducing the number of choices to simplify the decision-making process

Onboarding

Upon relaunching the SSP and combining anecdotal feedback, analytics data and real-time incident reporting, the improvements were quick and demonstrable, with unparalleled praise from the top of the organisation down. Jo’s team were able to easily demonstrate to other departments how much more efficient their workflow could be while simultaneously reducing their workload, and this resulted in departments approaching them and requesting to be onboarded next.

The demos across the other departments showed what the changes were, how to use the SSP as an operator, how to keep knowledge items up to date, and how it would be more efficient to collaborate with other departments as it meant they could pass tickets between themselves.

Data & Knowledge Management

Data was vital in the launch of TOPdesk at Bath Spa. For example, they now know that over 50% of their user base access the SSP on a mobile device.

The team have encouraged departments to create knowledge items instead of spending time responding to the same requests over and over, which means a better, quicker service for end users.

Knowledge items have also been important for cross departmental training. They have now found that if someone leaves the organisation, someone can step into the role successfully because they are not siloing knowledge. This shared inter-organisational knowledge gives a community feeling, helping to pass tickets from one team to another.

The Results

The departments who are now fully onboarded include IT Services, Student Information Team, Student Wellbeing Services, Timetabling Team, Digital Learning Developers, Facilities, Security, Strategic Projects and Change, Data and Insight Service, and more. These departments are now championing the SSP to other departments, resulting in requests from HR and Finance to begin onboarding as part of a larger project.