By Duncan Troup on Friday, December 9th, 2016 in Customer-centric Thinking.

At Tingle Tree we have built a strong customer base in the University sector having worked with 5  of the top universities in Australia in our first 15 months in business. This focus has very much been by accident more than design from a sales perspective, but it is a reflection of how aligned the Tingle Tree service mindset is with Universities. That being that we think about technology support services not with an ITIL frame of reference (although we are informed by it), but with the idea that we are the same as any front office service you may come across in the “real world”.

So to explain that a little more, here are 3 reasons why your average service desk agent should get LinkedIn to a university sector professional peer and grab lunch to learn about the excitement they see every day. It is my belief that that your average service management practitioner could learn a lot about being customer centric for the price of a sandwich.

#1 – university service desks are a front office service center
Many typical service management teams service the call centers, retail centers and operations staff of an organisation, who are often raising issues on behalf of customer. At least that was the case when i was the GM IT Operations at Medibank.  But not so at universities. They are part of the brands service performance in just as profound way as the call center operative is in a Health Insurance. Just think about that….they are not the IT Crowd in the basement, with the number hidden on the intranet. They have a phone number out there in GoogleLand with “proper” customers calling them at all times of the day. That really raises the stakes of the game.

#2 – university services are the last line of defense for a student in need
In your typical ITIL based service environment everyone talks about service catalogs and what services they provide. I am not saying that universities don’t do this…they do. But they are informed by their service catalogs, not defined by them. I speak from experience when i say that this open line to the world can generate calls about blocked toilets, anxious lost students, obscure CAD/CAM freeware or any manner of things. Its fair to say we never got those calls on the Medibank Service Desk when that was under my executive brief!!

#3 – there is a huge emphasis on supporting the user in their personal space away from the safety of “Milton’s cubicle world”
Being an on site support engineer on what universities call Day 1 (the first day of semester) can be a daunting prospect. If you were at our key client Melbourne University, that could mean being in front of 300 uber brainy students trying to fix an AV issue in front of a Nobel prize winner with limited social skills. Now if that doesn’t raise your adrenaline and don’t know what would!

So there you go…the university service management community are, in my view at least, some of the most customer centric IT service people i have had the pleasure to meet. So use LinkedIn to find them and learn a thing or two about being an actor on the stage not just a supporter in the wings.