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Help Desk

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What is a Help Desk? Simply it is a person to call or email who can help those trying to use the Portal. This could be parents, teachers, trustees, principals, or any other staff in the district.

You can deliver help in lots of different ways. You could have someone on the phone (live help), you could be prepared to answer emails, or you can prepare tips and answers that pop up online when the user is at a particular place in the Portal (context-sensitive help files). Or you could do all of these things.

Live Help

A phone number to call when there are problems brings comfort to the users, but you need to remember that parents will be calling outside of regular working hours. Providing telephone support by district staff outside of normal working hours could prove costly, especially if this is not otherwise a regular practice.

Consider other options:

  1. Student work experience. Students could provide help after hours but may still require supervision. One option may be to provide email support by students in as real time as possible. That is have students monitor the email box and respond quickly. A teacher (if required for supervision) could be monitoring responses as well. Real-time email is no longer a barrier with smartphone mobile access. Don’t forget to provide the students with some training in the portal technology itself but also in customer service skills.
  2. Parent volunteers. The Help Desk phone number could be forwarded to another number (home or mobile) for evening support. Parents or any adult volunteer would need some basic training in trouble-shooting problems. Help Desks will tell you that the most common problem is logging in, a problem easily fixed with an automated or manual password reset. Even two hours in an evening would provide parents with a known support connection that they would be able to reach. With enough volunteers, a Help Desk shift could be as little as one evening a month. The added benefit would be more parents who were trained in the Portal who become ambassadors at their schools.

Online Help

Even if the Portal is very easy to use, each time there are new features people will need to learn to use them. And teaching people to be self-sufficient, in essence providing their own help, reduces the phone calls and emails to staff and volunteers at the Live Help Desk.

This online help can take many forms, and it is a good idea to build or have several available.

    1. Create how-to pages for each feature or function in the Portal. Make these available in one place in the Portal, and link to the appropriate one from each feature location. Be sure to have sign-on/login help available in your publicly accessible web space. This sounds obvious, but is often forgotten that the user cannot make use of the help that they cannot reach!
    2. Allow how-to pages to be viewed or printed.
    3. Put information about how to get an account for the Parent Portal on the district’s main web page.
    4. Create or enable (if it comes with the Portal software) popup windows that provide help while a feature is being used. These may be available by pressing a particular key or by passing the mouse over the feature name.
    5. Make sure that whatever help comes with the Portal software is activated. Customize it to your Parent Portal if possible.

Whenever you make changes to your Parent Portal, always review your help pages to make sure the content is still accurate.