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ECN User Services - FAQ's


1.    ECN Staff don’t wear uniforms or other identifying insignia. How do I know they are who they say they are?

Check www.purdue.edu/ecn/people and see if we have a photo there. Or, call 44326, and ask the ECN staff on phones to authenticate them for you. We fully expect you to do this, and won’t feel offended or put out by this. In fact, it’ll probably make us feel good that you are being proactively safe against social engineering.


2.  How do you support this large a group with this few people?

Two thoughts come to mind: One is that our infrastructure groups make it very straightforward to implement and deliver resources to our end users. The vastly more important one is that our constituents and we share a mutual respect. Our constituents trust our assessments and our work ethic, and we trust the requests that people bring to us.


3.   Where are the User Services group members located?

Our group is scattered across campus, in five locations. However, the workload is balanced based upon the kind of task at hand. For example, a software install might be done by someone physically across campus.


4.   Why do group members change so much?

Our primary directive is that no school or department should lose institutional knowledge if the IT staffer leaves for another job. Given the vastness of ENGR, EVPRP and the Polytechnic’s collective needs, we’ve taken the tack of rapid rotation to make sure everybody knows the unique things about each group. We put a lot of behind-the-scenes communication in place to adjust for varying experience levels, as well as varying specialties in the field.

5.    What is the preferred method of contacting us?

Our preferred method of contacting us is definitely our webpage: www.purdue.edu/ECN/contactus - this collects information about your PC, matches it up with our databases, and provides us the most information about the PC without you needing to enter in names, IP addresses, locations, etc.


6.   Why does ECN not use the phone more?

Several reasons - Firstly, we use the phones to contact our constituents a lot. We have to balance the way we address your tickets with multiple approaches - visits, email, phone call with remote assistance. To this end, we’re on the phone several hours at a time with people. So, we address it by keeping a small number of staff helping staff the phones for the entire group. We try to make sure that the phone is answered by experienced people so that the time to resolution is kept low. We also don’t want people to wait for someone to return from sick leave or vacation to address their voicemail.


7.   I really liked working with Maria, and now she’s moving to another queue. Why can’t I have Maria work with me all the time?

See Answer #4. Also, we promise that the person who follows Maria will be just as good, if not better. If that’s not the case, let the Site Managers know, and we’ll fix the problem. The way we’ve set things up is that we have about a thousand active tickets at any given time, and we have to apportion them fairly across the staff, taking into account vacations and other absences.

 

Last Modified: Nov 10, 2020 1:41 pm US/Eastern
Created: Apr 7, 2016 10:54 am GMT-4 by admin
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