The University of the Western Cape has joined the two other Cape universities - UCT and Stellenbosch - in modernising and revamping its on campus IT support system through a successful installation of GoldMine`s Heat call centre customer relationship management package.
"The change in our service levels has been dramatic," says Roger Fester, help desk administrator at UWC. "Before we installed Heat, we had a manual customized system that was very paper intensive. Each time a call came in, a physical paper instruction was given to the technician. It was extremely difficult to ensure any type of central co-ordination."
With over 3000 IT users on the campus, the call rate for IT problems soon became overwhelming using the old system. "We get between 600 and 1000 calls per month," explains Fester. "Now however with Heat we are able to integrate our human resources database into our call centre operations and all of the previous problems have been overcome."
When a client now calls the UWC call centre, an operator assigns the caller a reference identity number, and through integration with the UWC HR database, is able to accurately capture all of the caller`s details, including location, telephone number, staff number - in fact a complete profile of the individual concerned. This is all done automatically and by itself considerably cuts down the caller time.
The only physical input which the operator has to make is to capture the nature of the problems - this part is unavoidable, and is complicated by the fact that surprisingly few of the callers are IT literate, adds Fester.
"Who ever logs the jobs decides what the problem is and then designates it to the appropriate division," he continues. "This process is also fully automated, and so if it is a printer problem, the printer IT section will be electronically notified of the complaint and will then attend to it. The same goes for any other department that may be affected, be it hardware, internet or software."
UWC decided on Heat as its product of choice because of its "out of the box functionality," says Fester. "The windows, screens and interface all came prepackaged, and the Heat people did everything for us. Even those small parts that we wanted to modify for our own particular system, were easily changed, again with the people from Heat`s advice. But the real use of the system is that we could use 90 per cent of package as it stood without any changes whatsoever."
The customisation took no more than a week in man-hours, according to Duncan Wierman, account manager, Goldmine in Cape Town. "They urgently required a better system as the previous package they were using was simply not producing the required management and reporting tools," Wierman says.
"We knew exactly what their requirements were going to be from the experience we had gained by doing the Universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch`s helpdesk installations. Everything went without a hitch and the whole project was completed within two weeks," Wierman concludes.
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