Customer-Centered IT Support: Foundations, Principles, and Systems

To meet the IT support demands of more than 98,000 students and 15,000 faculty and staff across eight campuses, Indiana University developed a fully integrated Online Support Environment (OSE) that handles an average 2.5 million IT support contacts each year, or the equivalent of one every 12 seconds. For users, it looks like a vast array of IT services and a searchable database of IT questions and answers. For the IT organization, it supplies a dynamic picture of the questions users ask and the topics they research, as well as usage and satisfaction data. This bulletin discusses how IT met the challenge to provide pervasive, around-the-clock support and outlines the considerations that informed the design of the resulting OSE.