Services in International Schools

Schools and educational institutes are service organizations. The better their service is the better the institution is. Education is the core to all services an international school caters. Other service examples which are to support education service are are IT services, housekeeping services, transport services, procurement of supplies, medical services, management of health and safety issues etc. All these areas of services are equally important for an international standard educational institute. These services are usually catered by small autonomous departments which are managed by a small group or people or sometimes outsourced.

These other (other than education delivery) services are often neglected as monitoring and improvement can be complex and resource intensive. Usually schools do not have any standard way to assure and measure other service qualities in a regular basis, which prevent them from fixing regular issues or improving these services.

If the school or an educational institution implements a few simple standard process to log and monitor their process, help the institution significantly to add and improve to their service and quality. This will also makes all groups accountable for their requests and actions and the service quality can be measured.

How can a school benefit from a process management tool

In a process management tool (such as OTRS) any custom processes can be mapped in the system. All that require service can be referred as customers. Service can be provided by an internal team or by na outsourced team; for either of the case a process management tool such as OTRS is equally effective. This process management system also used helpdesk management; any customer with a requirement or an issue can open a ticket through an email or a login portal.

Once the ticket is opened an agent (in an educational institute’s cause it is a team member of the corresponding department) is assigned to it. This ticket should be acknowledged and processed by the team. Until the issue is resolved the ticket stays open and can be tracked by any interested party, as a part of an MIS report of individually. Any process can be mapped in to the system as per the process flow. For example approvals, escalation, automated notification, reminder etc. Moreover, conditions for changing status and other ticket attributes can be defined. This offers a great possibility for many process and use cases.

Process management system and helpdesk with OTRS:

OTRS is a Helpdesk management system is such a system, supports ITIL standards. OTRS is open source, completely web-based. OTRS supports ticket creation by the customers, (in a school customers are students, teachers, and partners) who requires a services or support. A predefined group of people or a support team member will be assigned to the request where one person has to acknowledge and follow-up the issue/request on until resolved. An escalation matrix can be attached in case of delay.  Customer can monitor the progress at each stage, who is addressing it, what stage it is in and would know then the issue is resolved. Overall performance matrix can be monitored within the system.

OTRS supports Knowledge management, self-service, service catalog, ticket management, time accounting, single sign-on, survey, reporting etc.

Such process management and helpdesk can help the institution to

• Improved services
• Reduced costs
• Improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery
• Improved productivity
• Improved use of skills and experience
• Improved delivery of third party service.

Mange your services and helpdesk through OTRS:

OTRS can be implemented in house in your own server system or subscribed in the cloud as SaaS. To implement and manage OTRS for your school, educational institution or other business you may contact me directly or contact you may contact me directly or visit http://xeois.com and http://globalsm.pw/. These companies are run by a team of people who have long experience with education industry.

Tag: Helpdesk, service management, process management, OTRS, International school, educational institution, School.