December 19, 2024
Evolving Support for Evolving Needs
A few months ago, a content manager at the Department of Public Health encountered an error while updating the DPH site. He opened a ticket with DSGa’s Service Desk, as he had done many times before. We got to work on resolving the issue, as we have done many times before. The difference this time was that our team had been watching the number of support requests like a car’s odometer, and it was now only one away from rolling over to a significant milestone. It was the 4,999th ticket submitted since the ticketing system launched in 2017.
As the landscape of government digital services has transformed in the past decade, DSGa's Service Desk has evolved alongside the state agencies we support. We’ve gone from offering assistance for one product – a content management system – to supporting seven products and services, including accessibility auditing and usability testing.
Now that our 5,000th ticket has come and gone, it’s a good time to reflect on how our services, and the way we support them, has matured.
As the landscape of government digital services has transformed in the past decade, DSGa's Service Desk has evolved alongside the state agencies we support. We’ve gone from offering assistance for one product – a content management system – to supporting seven products and services, including accessibility auditing and usability testing.
Toward Self-Service and Empowerment
Around the time our digital services office was established, we relied on an enterprise support desk service that had limited features. Even before that enterprise solution, email was our primary way of offering support. It’s hard to say how many help requests we served with these methods because our team, while dedicated, was small. We answered questions as they came in, and moved on to the next question without having a formal process in place.
This reactive approach struggled to keep pace with the growing number of tickets, which increased with the expansion of our customer base. In 2019, we launched GovHub as a bundled subscription service that included access to Siteimprove. That year, we handled almost 250 tickets, a number that rose to nearly 700 in 2021, and 900 in 2023.
Recognizing the need for a more scalable and cohesive approach, we transitioned to Jira Service Desk. This tool allowed us to streamline our workflow that connects and informs our work by linking support tickets to projects. We also integrated a search of our Knowledge Base, empowering our content managers to self-serve by looking up solutions themselves. By providing them with a tool to find answers independently, we reduced the number of support tickets that needed instructions, and could devote more time to responding to tickets that required critical thought.
A key outcome of this self-service was improved overall efficiency for both our agencies and us. Content managers could bypass the need to wait on a support response, and we could effortlessly offer consistent and accurate instructions every time, regardless of the team members who staff the desk on any given day.
Taking a Take-Charge Stance
Hand in hand with a robust and engaging service desk to support our agency partners was the effort we undertook a few years ago to mature our training program. Two motivating factors around 2019-2020 contributed to this trajectory:
- We were upgrading to a new version of the state content management system that required new content for training.
- COVID-19 sent many of us to work remotely, which made in-person training classes impossible at the time.
To meet these needs, we developed on-demand training courses available through a learning management system that covered basic how-to instructions on the most common tasks that content managers would use in the CMS. Training also included some advanced topics, such as web writing and site performance and measurement best practices. We implemented a process that requires new content managers to take the basic training and that has contributed to a reduction in support tickets asking for instructions.
We have this data because the service desk tool allows us to identify categories of tickets. That is an important piece of the feedback loop to help steer us towards the topics in the Knowledge Base and LMS that we need to add or update.
Today, a majority of our support tickets are GovHub access requests, content management questions, Siteimprove queries, webform issues, and document management concerns. That may change as technologies emerge in our products and services, which we can better anticipate with the service desk and other feedback systems we have in place with our agency partners.
Moving Forward Together
Our efforts to evolve from a reactive to a proactive support model have yielded positive, future-facing outcomes. We have seen a reduction in tickets for instructions, allowing our team to focus on more complex issues. Our content managers are more empowered and self-sufficient, thanks to a comprehensive Knowledge Base and on-demand training resources. Moreover, our customer satisfaction scores have remained consistently high, reflecting our commitment to providing an exceptional experience.
On average, we now spend 42.5 hours per month on the support desk, handling approximately 30 tickets in the same timeframe. We see significant engagement from our partner agencies., with 58 agencies opening tickets last year. To us, that indicates a high level of trust and reliance on our support services.
As we look to the future, we remain dedicated to exploring new ways to enhance our support services. By fostering a culture of learning, providing proactive support, and streamlining our processes, we can continue to meet the evolving needs of state agencies and ensure their success in delivering information and services to Georgians.