Issuetrak Help Desk Software Powers Renaissance Academy

Business Challenge

A tuition-free public charter school in Phoenixville, PA, 45 minutes northwest of Philadelphia, the Renaissance Academy serves grades K-12 with a high-quality liberal arts, college preparatory education. A testament to the school’s mission, parents, students, and teachers sign quarterly learning contracts in which they promise to work together for student success. An IT team of three serves the technology help desk needs of 122 full-time staff serving 940 students. The techs address everything from printer cartridge replacements to software updates to setting up portable speaker systems for presentations.

Over the years, the help desk has tried various approaches for managing requests. Early on, they used FileMaker Pro. More recently, the team deployed a software solution that, while more feature-rich than FileMaker, was difficult to use and required the vendor to create reports for them. To address customer needs proactively, Renaissance sought a more powerful help desk solution.

Solution

Renaissance found the answer in Issuetrak help desk software, which addresses the team’s top requirements and more.

“Issuetrak is definitely more user friendly than what we had before and we can run our own reports off of it,” said Ron Confino, user technology support.

Since implementing Issuetrak, the help desk enforces processes among the team and staff. Now, staff input their requests online, instead of stopping one of the help desk team members in the hallway about a need.

With everything in the system, Todd Krock, technology coordinator, knows the status of tickets and never lets anything go too long without resolution. Using workflows (formerly called escalation rules) in Issuetrak, he is notified if certain types of tickets stay open longer than others.

“We have accountability on the end users and techs to make sure we’re documenting things properly,” Krock said.

With such a small team, Krock set up Issuetrak to alert all three members as issues come in. The first available person takes a ticket and begins working on it, contributing to more responsive customer service.

Built-in automation ensures strong communication with Renaissance staff members. When anyone opens a ticket, they immediately receive an email letting them know that it’s in the system and will be addressed – a simple step that gives them peace of mind.

Krock now runs reports to understand trends and scheduled issues. For example, the team knows the staff members who log the most tickets and the most frequently occurring types of problems, indicating potential training needs or equipment replacement needs.

Issuetrak also keeps daily, weekly and monthly checklists and reminds the team to take care of certain tasks, such as checking server room temperatures or logs. And when a tech closes out that item, everyone has a record that it’s complete. Renaissance Academy finds the software simple to use and manage – especially compared to its last help desk application.

“Issuetrak’s service is great, but honestly it’s very rare that we have to call,” Krock said. “Everything runs and does what we need it to do.”

Benefits

As a school, Renaissance operates with limited resources, demanding that teachers, staff and students be as productive as possible. Issuetrak helps the IT team resolve needs faster and get back on task – driving toward those goals of student success.