At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, one of the nation’s largest school districts was facing a state mandate to support remote learning for over a million students in very little time. Although Celsior had been providing an IT service desk for the school district’s teachers, this would require setting up a new service desk for over a million students and their parents, as well as expanding the existing teachers’ service desk.

Challenges

The school system offered over 300,000 iPads and Chromebooks to students and their families who did not have access to internet-connected devices and had limited technology experience besides the parents’ phones.

Due to how rapidly the COVID-19 remote learning mandate was being implemented in the state, it was critical for the district to quickly have the service desk staffed, trained, and ready to respond to the needs of parents, families, and the school system.

Our solution

Celsior provided a custom solution to rapidly onboard and train a full team of service desk agents and supervisors to provide Level I support services to the students and parents in support of the remote learning mandate.

In addition, we developed a cross-training plan to ensure contract agents were equipped and ready to support teachers with their new requirements, such as Zoom meetings. Total personnel for the combined teacher and student / parent service desks nearly tripled in size with the additional agents, supervisors, and associated personnel.

Service desk agents were identified, interviewed, hired, and trained to set up the new service desk within one month and achieve full coverage within two months. A key measure ensuring success was holding daily partnership meetings with Celsior, the client, and the client’s systems integrator.

Going beyond the original RFP scope, we responded to new customer requests, including:

• Implementing multi-lingual support by hiring Spanish-speaking agents and a language-line service for all other languages (including Mandarin, Cantonese, various African languages, and many others).
• Expanding service hours beyond weekdays to cover weekend hours.

Business outcomes

Celsior was able to identify gaps in existing customer operations and applied best practices plus agent training to address operational gaps and improve agent productivity and service desk performance. Service level objectives were set for call answer rate, average speed to answer (ASA), abandonment rate, and average call handle time (AHT).

Overall, we achieved an impressive customer satisfaction metric of 98.6% under difficult circumstances. The real benefit, however, was the learning of the students.