Single portal to self-help

The University of Manchester will use a knowledge management solution to automate self-service and support initiatives for more than 36,000 students and 11,500 faculty members.

The Unified Knowledge Suite from Right Answers will help the university improve user and support technician productivity and efficiency, according to RightAnswers. Students, faculty, staff and other users will have round-the-clock, online access to the knowledgebase for self-resolving issues. Support technicians can use the solution to resolve open incidents and access key IT support resources to minimize help desk call durations, increase first-call resolution rates and reduce call escalation percentages.

“In the past, we had a series of FAQs and articles across different sites, and there was really no way for our support analysts to easily access this information,” says James Woodward, problem and knowledge manager for IT services at the University of Manchester. “We decided that in order for analysts to be able to support users from different faculties, it was important for us to have a single portal where all information would be available. We also wanted to improve the provisioning of information to users, giving them 24x7 access to our support team.”

The university will also now have the ability to submit university-specific written content to its knowledgebase, because the suite is said to provide a full range of knowledge authoring services. Furthermore, the university can produce audit trails and reports for every support issue that is logged in the system.