Targeted Email Communications and IT's Bad Reputation

December 11, 2009 Virtual Coffee Shop

• • The two topics were Targeted Email Communications" and "Why is IT always to Blame OR How do you fix a bad reputation?"

Topic 1 – Targeted Email Communications

• • Randy Jobski, Lansing Community College, presenting (see attachment for slides)

  • The problem we’re trying to resolve is sending and receiving too many emails. Email is over-used so people get tons of emails, messages get buried, etc. People also get messages on topics they don’t care about.

  • There’s no one place people can to for tracking important messages.

  • Most email go to inboxes, not cell phones or other channels unless individuals have set up their own account or device to do this.

  • Communicating outages to the campus as a whole?

  • Lansing Community College is launching a targeted email communications application in Oracle Application Express. Only offered to LCC employees at this point, not students. Would consider in future, but want to launch for employees first. Next steps: finalize testing, promote application to encourage LCC employees to sign up.

  • These communications can be degradation of service, outage, maintenance, etc. All employees can see the web interface. Limited pool of IT staff who can create new messages. Employees can subscribe. Can choose message groups they want (portal, Banner, etc.).

  • Employees can choose cell phone or email (3 addresses and 3 phone numbers they can add).

  • Most users only want the production notifications, but IT staff interested in the development updates as well. Subscribers can choose either or both.

  • Coffee Shop Discussion, after presentation

  • Carlyn – Rice - I just found out that the 300+ people I had subscribed last October (so every department had at least one representative on our IT-Alerts mailing list)…that subscriber list is now down to 130 people so obviously departments have unsubscribed themselves!

  • Melanie – UTEP – limited groups can send various messages. one group is responsible for emergency communications; only have 1100 people subscribed to the emergency message channel. Anyone can send general campus updates, still a problem filtering and no archiving.

  • Larry – Hawaii – the dumping problem of email we resolved by sending a basic message and then putting the details are posted on the IT web site.

  • Melanie – UTEP – you were so right when you commented on concise is better. Now I make everything fit in one window, eliminated graphics, etc. and now more people are saying “oh, yes, I saw that.”

  • Larry – I saw one university that color-coded their status updates so you could see on their web page exactly what was affected.

  • Melanie – I forgot to mention that for general campus announcements, once a week on Friday, you can see headlines for all messages posted with links to details.

  • Greg – CU-Boulder – the system shown in the presentation, is that on off-the-shelf produce?

  • Randy – LCC – we did develop it ourselves in Oracle Applications Express. The application is text based, we believe we’ve found in our tests that we can suck out data from the app and push to Google Calendar. It is vapor ware at this point but we do believe it is do-able.

  • This will also be a central repository. And the dream is what we publish here will be pushed to the portal as well. XML will be constantly feeding data to the portal. If there is no current information, nothing will be

  • U North Florida - we’re using the Sharepoint calendar. Do you have Sharepoint there, Randy?

  • Randy -Yes, we do but on my team, we don’t have anyone skilled in sharepoint development. I’d like to get someone with experience on Sharepoint or Flex.

  • People can go in any time and change their preferences. For our campus crisis messages, that is a completely separate system.

Topic 2 -Why is IT to blame and how do you combat your “bad reputation?”

• • Carlyn- Rice – From 2004-2006, we REALLY worked on improving our reputation with our customers. We started with accepting responsibility for our actions. When something went down, whether it was planned or not, we admitted it. We started sending out messages that said essentially "sorry for the inconvenience, the system was down and we've resolved the problem." It took a lot of hard work to change the IT culture. Our techies weren't used to talking about the things they worked on, they just "fixed stuff." Even if something they were fixing broke something else, we still took responsibility as a department with an announcement. Once our behind-the-scenes techies began to see we weren't point fingers at individuals in our messages, but that the entire IT division was being held responsible for outages, it helped them come forward more often with the apps or servers they were planning to fix. Because of the long history of IT working in a self-imposed silo and not communicating what we were working on, it took at least a year for the community to begin believing we would really tell them when something was down or having problems. We now have a 15-minute rule: if something is down or degraded for 15 minutes, we have to get a message out. It doesn't have to be detailed, just "we know there's a problem, we're working on it, and we'll post updates to the IT web site." That brief message was another culture change. Our techies didn't want to publish announcements until we knew what was wrong and how we were going to fix it. But we found that delaying a message until we had all the details didn't help our customers. Is anyone else battling a bad reputation and how are you working on that?

  • Melanie – UTEP – we recently had a sewage problem and it was “IT’s fault.” Because we’ve been blamed fo so much in the past that wasn't our fault, we have a hard time telling the community when something really is wrong.

  • Important to get out a message as soon as you can – “yes we know something’s going on.”

  • Alison - UNF – we use a voice mail system when our power is out and we can’t get other electronic messages out. “This message recorded at…service”

  • Melanie – UTEP - we have VOIP so if the power is out in our building, we can’t send anything out. Now have a generator in next building that we can rely on.

  • Larry – Hawaii – we had the same problem when we had an earthquake and the governing board realized that we had to have a way to communicate if our primary power was out and we also now have an external generator.

  • Melanie – loud speaker system now installed outside, can use for emergencies.

  • Larry – Hawaii – we have the loud speakers, plus officer in golf carts with loud speakers because a mountain breaks up our campus. The security officers have direct communications with security office and can get out those messages right out.

  • Biggest asset is keeping our help desk as informed as much as we can. Since we push them as the place to go, we have to keep them informed.

  • Carlyn – how did you get the rest of IT staff to tell Help Desk what’s going on?

  • Melanie – we have an internal incident log.

  • Larry – yes, we have that as well and everyone just knows we have to tell the Help Desk what is going on.

  • Larry – we have team that gets together once a week to manage the changes, communications, etc. and it goes very quickly. In fact, we had some people who wanted to test or change some items during finals and the team said, “nope, that’s not a good time.”

  • Carlyn – we have a short meeting as well three times a week, 30 minutes only. Have to submit items ahead of time, only discussing pre-submitted items in meeting. Can bring up a topic and ask when is a good time to do this, but can’t bring up a change…

  • Melanie – we also have a monthly maintenance window, third Thursday night of the month. But changes done in that maintenance window still have to be approved.

  • Carlyn – we have 48 and 24 hour notice requirements.

  • Melanie – we have one week and 24 hour notices as well, then include on portals, etc. and we use the digital signs as well.

  • Carlyn – can you talk more about the digital signs?

  • Melanie – we opened this up to anyone who wanted to buy their own building one and we gave them part of the screen to put anything on it. Anything that goes in a Powerpoint, except Flash, can go there. Most of the screen is dedicated to campus announcements. 10 buildings are participating now. 80-90% of messages aimed at students and is very well received. Emergency communications can take over entire screen. If you have one player and 10 screens, have to think about 3 different floors, 3 different messages, have to have 3 different players. Or you can put all messages on all screens (rotation).

  • Carlyn – anyone using one-on-on or focus groups to work on combating “bad reputation?”

  • Larry – our Help Desk serves 10 campuses state-wide. Really hard to track responses. Here where we go to help people at their desks, we ask them to fill out a survey. We get that on every desk where someone goes to assist. We’re working on rolling that out as an online survey to all campuses and include in our general survey ask about Help Desk.

  • Roberta – University of Nevada system using something similar as far as customer response after assistance. Random ticket targeted for survey. Something new for us is a monthly report out of our ticketing system directed to the CIO at each campus. Every request for assistance is ticketed. On a random basis, tickets are selected for a survey. How were you treated, do you feel we were competent, knowledgeable, etc.

  • Larry – how do you connect, is it with a link?

  • Roberta – yes, the email contains a link to the survey and then we get reports on that information. Will have to get the return rate on that.

  • Melanie – our annual student survey is about 11 different service and IT is one of those. We offer prized for all the different sections you complete.

  • Question: how do you give prizes?

  • Melanie – you have to log in to complete the survey. We don’t give the login information to the groups receiving the report information, we strip it out and use it for prize drawings only.

  • The funny thing is, I was asking classmates…when we have online course evaluations, do you do them? 8 out of 10 people said they don’t. They don’t want to have to go fill it out on a computer. If the paper is handed to them, they will fill it out right there.

  • Melanie – thinking back on what we were all saying, it seems to be the same thing… the users don’t want to be in the dark and they don’t want to be talked down to. If you can tell them why they are going to benefit from an update or other scheduled outage, they will accept it. It doesn’t have to be a detailed description. This will streamline your online payment process, etc.

  • Larry – yes, and we always include a “thank you for your patience…we’re working to make this better for you…” and a note on where to find additional details or other IT issues announcements.

  • Sometimes all they need to hear is “I know, I’m sorry.” Accept responsibility, acknowledge the problem and move on to fix it.