NMIT supports its student community with a robust platform

The Challenge

For severalyears, the NMIT customer support system had survived using 30 shared Outlook inboxes. It experienced challenges managing emails, FAQs, and its overall customer service.

“Looking back, our previous system seems ridiculous. We had no way of tracking emails, no transparency, and not much collaboration between departments. Things kept getting lost or forgotten about.”

The NMIT website was also being overhauled and re-designed. The digital team at NMIT felt that the website content needed refining, but wanted a way to provide more content for supporting students and potential students.

This led Marketing Systems Co-ordinator, Olly Barrett, to search for a helpdesk platform that could offer both a ticketing system and knowledgebase software.

“At a previous role, I had used Zendesk, but it was very expensive if you wanted all of the features and had a lot of hidden costs.”

The Solution

After an extensive search, NMIT deployed Deskpro on Cloud. Within the education sector, it's key that personal details and information are kept secure. Utilizing bank-level security on the Deskpro Cloud account, with the option of On-Premise deployment if needed, NMIT sees the implementation of Deskpro as a long-term relationship.

Over 25% of the content on the NMIT website is contained within the knowledgebase. The team wanted to guarantee that that information would be available for students and others around the clock.

“We decided to deploy Deskpro Cloud, because it has such a good up-time and I enjoy not having to worry about the maintenance of the servers and helpdesk health.”

Previously, NMIT didn’t have access to reporting surrounding their customer service. Whilst reporting gives stats, it doesn’t show the whole story.

The audit trail that can be followed within the ticketing system allowed Olly and the other helpdesk managers more transparent view of audit logs and provide the ‘story’ behind a ticket and help explain why and what happened.

“Access to audit trails took away a lot of debate. We could see exactly what had happened to a ticket and who needed to action it, that has really helped us with managing our support agents.”

The Benefits

The impact of NMIT switching to Deskpro was felt instantly; with extensive customization and powerful automated triggers.

“Deskpro brought visibility of actions, ability to implement SLAs with ease, update support processes and generally improve our communication.”

Before Deskpro, the IT department at NMIT would regularly get contacted about issues (mainly trivial) that could actually be solved by the students. They set about building up their IT knowledge base with FAQs. Combined with ticket deflection on the contact forms, the new system dramatically reduced the strain on the IT department's resources.

“Overall, we found that a lot of students actually enjoy helping themselves, when it comes to support. They are the ones in control. But if they need extra help, we are always there.”

Initially, the customer support agents at NMIT were hesitant to change from Outlook. But Olly and his team made sure to take advantage of Deskpro’s training options to help empower the agent teams. Two weeks later, the agents had completely switched to Deskpro and have never looked back.

The Future

“The team at Deskpro has kept us informed about their roadmap and new features to be added, which has helped us to plan our next moves in advance.”

Under Olly’s guidance, the customer experience at NMIT has been steadily improving over the past couple of years, bringing on more agents, training, and aligning different departments.

“Our aim is to provide the best service for our staff and students, we are still figuring out our best processes, but I feel like we have found the best helpdesk software to help us succeed in reaching our goal.”

Currently, NMIT is using Deskpro for external support, but the multi-brand feature has opened up the option of interconnecting external and internal communications in one helpdesk.

“Deskpro has worked out tremendously for us at NMIT. The education sector in New Zealand is very tight-knit and I regularly find myself recommending Deskpro to others.”