Boise State University, located in Boise, Idaho, is home of the Broncos and innovation.
Like many Universities, online degrees are expanding to meet the needs of students and make learning more accessible. While classes run smoothly most of the time, technical difficulties arise and faculty need support. A technically savvy support team is essential and needs to be organized during busy times.
Faculty from 60 different departments and 250+ courses send support tickets throughout the year and it is difficult to prevent email chaos.
The Problem
Delegating and Tracking Incoming Support Emails
Sam Rainey is one of Boise State's Online Learning Technologists at the eCampus Center and is responsible for operations and improving processes. His team of four supports the online programs and each support person covers various programs.
Sam's team receives a high volume of support tickets each day, anything from a faculty member needing something fixed quickly with their online course or program-wide changes to more detailed design requests. As online administrators, they want to ensure they're responding to internal teams quickly and are able to efficiently organize internal documents and course permissions.
On a normal day, each support team member would log into their shared Gmail inbox via a Chrome Incognito window so they could access their individual program assignments. They would use tags to mark emails assigned to each team member and drag them to their respective team member folder.
We struggled with email organization and keeping up with incoming requests. We would get stuck in our individual emails and forget to check our shared email account.
\. Sam, Online Learning Technologist for eCampus Support
This support team was experiencing what many support teams do with typical support inboxes:
- Logging into emails from multiple windows
- Emails moved into folders and forgotten about
- Difficulty organizing emails
- Ticket status or ownership were missing
The Solution
Streamlined Email Management Across Departments
Fast forward to a state where the support team has access to their Shared Inbox and their individual Gmail accounts in the same location. All in one window tab.
Here is how the support team manages emails now:
- Assign incoming emails to the proper support person
- Collaborate and ask internal questions about emails through email mentions and tagging
- Help answer team members' emails if they are out sick using the board view
- Organize and easily access templates
- Seamlessly switch between our shared email and individual accounts
- See who has opened emails
The support team also works with instructional designers, media, copyright and accessibility teams making collaborating cross-functionally much more streamlined. All teams have more visibility into workload and requests. It benefits not just the support team but helps break down silos over multiple departments.
The Outcome
No Email Requests Left Behind
The support team at Boise State's goal is to continuously improve online courses for faculty and students. Gmelius helps them achieve that goal by saving 2-3 hours of email management a day since they've onboarded. They've been able to improve relationships with different programs and faculty across the campus due to their response times and responsiveness.
- Save 2-3 hours a day of email management
- Better relationships with different programs and faculty on campus
- Zero emails slipping through cracks
- Increase accountability when someone is on vacation
- More visibility into the status of all email tickets
Next step for Sam's team is mastering workflow automation rules within Gmelius to help turn manual tasks into automatic actions on the backend, saving the support team even more time to focus on achieving their goals and providing excellent support.
What would your team be able to accomplish if they got 10 hours of their time back each week?
We thought about hiring an entry-level worker to help manage our incoming support requests but with Gmelius we were able to cut down time by 2-3 hours a day of email management and no longer needed to hire someone.
\. Sam, Online Learning Technologist for eCampus Support
