Jisc OpenAthens Service Desk Team Charter
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Access Lab 2020: Our service availability and customer charter Joe Bromley, platform engineer and Ian Allchurch, support analyst, OpenAthens
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Jisc OpenAthens Service Desk Team Charter
- 1. OpenAthens is a Jisc enterprise OpenAthens Service Availability Joe Bromley – Platform Engineer
- 2. Proxy service Authentication service Redirector OpenAthens infrastructure locations (February 2020)
- 3. Future OpenAthens infrastructure locations (not finalised) Proxy service Authentication service Redirector
- 4. 4 • Currently located in UK due to a contractual requirement of a major customer • We’ll be launching authentication infrastructure in additional locations later in 2020 • Currently located in US and Singapore • Will be launching 3rd location later in 2020 • Recent application changes help improve response times Authentication Service Redirector
- 5. 5 Proxy location UK OpenAthens provided IPs and Forward Proxy United States Forward Proxy only Australia (Sydney) Forward Proxy only Singapore Forward Proxy only, launched later in 2020 Managed proxy service
- 6. 6 Managed proxy service • Many improvements to the application and infrastructure being phased in to improve load times • Launched proxy “rewrite location” in Sydney in November 2019 • Use of Google Content Delivery Network (CDN) to cache some proxy content • 130 global cache locations
- 7. OpenAthens is a Jisc enterprise OpenAthens Service Desk Team Charter March 2020 Iain Allchurch – 1st Line Application Support Analyst Joe Bromley – Platform Engineer
- 8. 8 What is a Customer Charter?
- 9. 9 Why did we do this?
- 10. 10 Our customer base has grown Customers at start of 2018: 1073 Customers today: 1731
- 11. 11
- 13. 13 How the customer interaction has changed 13 What to expect from us? What we’d like from you?
- 14. 14 How did we do this?
- 15. 15 The team built the Charter It wasn’t Marketing 15 It was us!
- 16. 16 What the team wanted in the charter Based on our own previous experiences Promoting our positive team culture Our own opinions were key
- 17. 17 New brand OpenAthens has gone through a rebrand Helped with a positive change of mentality
- 18. 18 What it is and what it isn’t 18
- 19. 19 It’s not an SLA document
- 20. 20 It is our team’s voice
- 21. 21 What the charter could mean to you
- 22. 22 What have the benefits been? Team are updating tickets more often Language used is easier to understand New starter benefit expectation Seen a slow but gradual increase in customer feedback Sales team
- 23. 23 It’s what sets us apart
- 24. 24 OpenAthens opening hours 24 7:00 – 22:00 GMT Monday to Friday
- 25. 25 openathens.net help@openathens.net +44 (0)300 121 0043 Thank you from the OpenAthens Service Desk
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone, and welcome to the first of OpenAthens specific talks. my name’s Joe and I’m a platform engineer at OpenAthens. Today I’m going talk to you about some of the infrastructure that the OpenAthens service runs on and the future improvements we’re putting in place. I’m sure you’ll agree that at this time that access to content is incredibly important. And access to this content no matter where you are is a bigger requirement than before with more people than ever working from home. So I’d like to discuss the improvements we’re making to our service to improve reliability and speed across the globe. And just as an FYI we’ll be answering questions at the end of this session so feel free to pop those questions into the chat for us to answer a bit later on.
- The image you’re seeing here shows a breakdown of how we have some of our key services laid out. We have our main authentication point located in the UK, our proxy service has components in Australia, Singapore, the US and the UK, which is a mixture of proxy routers and our forward proxy service, and our redirector product is based in the US and Singapore. How we’re able to do this is by using cloud services for the majority of our infrastructure, which gives us excellent availability to host our service across the globe, with high uptime and performance. Over the last year alone we’ve been expanding out our proxy service to best suit the needs of customers that require proxy access to content providers, particularly in the APAC region. But we haven’t stopped those improvements yet. A lot of changes are being made at the application level, to improve the service as well as spreading out our infrastructure in regions that require it.
- And now what we want to do in the future. Here you can see our intended changes. All of these changes are made with speed and reliability in mind. Rather than the majority of traffic routing through the UK we want to ensure continuity across the globe.
- Authentication service: Currently we’re limited on where our authentication service can be located due to a contractual agreement. This is set to change in the future allowing us to expand the service, allowing us to launch the authentication infrastructure to the US with the plan to later do the same in Singapore. Redirector: And as you saw on the 2nd map I showed, the redirector is being added to a 3rd location in the UK. Which as I’ve expressed multiple times, and will continue to will improve response times to lead to a much better user experience.
- To access the proxy services, new customers in the US and Australia currently will use the forward proxy to get the best results. Singapore will soon follow later this year. We have a router in the US and Singapore The router only kicks in during login It's the bit that sends to user to one of eu1, us1, or ap1, based on how their orglet is setup
- Managed proxy service: We’ve seen significant improvements in load times. These may not have been noticed in the UK but overseas we’ve used transaction checks to confirm the improvement of load times. In 2019, to improve our customers experience, we launched a ‘rewrite location’ in Sydney, which, for customers using our forward proxy service in Australia will provide improved performance by using a geographically closer proxy service As our infrastructure uses Google, we’re utilizing the Google content delivery network to cache some proxy content to improve the response times to websites. There are 130 locations of these CDNs that cover the globe Thank you for listening to our update on the OpenAthens service and I hope I made our goals to improve the service very clear, I’m now going to invite my colleague Iain, who will be talking with me on the OpenAthens service desk customer charter
- Thanks Joe Hi I'm Iain and I work for OpenAthens on the Service Desk as an Application Support Analyst. Today, with Joe, as he kindly mentioned we're going to talk you through our first ever Service Desk Team Charter. You can find our charter on openathens.org under About Us, there you will find a link off to the Charter
- Iain Lets start by explaining what a Customer Charter is - Our Service Desk Customer Charter is a valuable tool for sharing our commitment to healthy relationships, demonstrating our competitive edge, and instilling confidence in our customers. It holds our support team accountable for the service we provide, and promotes positive behaviours within the team. The charter also encourages our customers to share any feedback with us. Today we’re going to take you through our Customer Charter and make it clear what we aim for on a daily basis
- Iain So why did we do this? Well there's a few reasons….
- Iain *Click to animate GIF* As you can see from this video, over the last 18 years, our customer base has grown. We’ve experienced rapid growth over the last 2 years. We’ve seen expansion across Europe, other parts of the globe, particularly in the US and our personal favourite, *Click*
- the Faroe islands
- Iain With the customer base continually expanding , we’ve had to grow our team. Over the last 18 months, our team has doubled in size. We want our new team members to get a feel for how the current team see what great customer service looks like. The charter helps promote a positive team mentality, a fair and productive team culture, we want new starters to consistently adopt good working practices early on in their OpenAthens careers.
- Joe What to expect from us? We’ve openly tried to change our language to improve the interactions between ourselves and you. Speaking too formally or with too much tech jargon doesn’t actually progress things as quickly as you’d think. We want to keep things simple and easy to follow but try to guauge the conversation based on the technical understanding. It’s a fine line between patronising and helpful but we try our best to bridge that gap. We want to make sure everyone has the opportunity to come back to us for further assistance/help What we’d like from you? We always want to work as efficiently as possible so decided to outline what you can do to make that easier for us and to minimise unnecessary back and forth. What does that mean though? Sometimes we receive an email saying, ‘this link doesn’t work’. This kind of email results in more questions than actions. So when you’re experiencing an issue we want to know how you got to that place and how it’s affecting your users. The key is in the detail and it’ll help us to help you. And the best thing you can do for us is feedback. We want to know what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong. Otherwise it’ll take us longer to improve and I’ll be honest, we don’t want to be bad. We want you to be satisfied with what we’ve done/ doing.
- Joe Now I’d like to talk you through how we did this.
- Joe It was born out of the service desk team and not the marketing team and was never intended on being used as a marketing tool but rather a reflection of the service that the support team want to provide you. Marketing didn’t make us do this, honestly. We’re proud to say that everyone in our team wanted contribute to the charter as it does show you how our team feel about the support we offer. The team got together over a series of collaborative sessions where we could exchange ideas and get each and every team members view on what great support looks like to them. Ironically we were probably not being a good service desk because we spent time doing this… Sorry about that…
- Joe Our own opinions were key We’ve got a lot of tenure in our team but we’ve also got a lot of new people. Having this kind of diversity in the team leads to loads of interesting opinions, not necessarily related to their current role but… Based on our own previous experiences Based on their previous experience. This is valid for both new and old team members. You can have a universal understanding of what makes good customer service but you also benefit from having a close relationship with customers. We really put into practice putting ourselves in your shoes and what we believed were the best interactions that we’ve had in the past. Promoting a positive team culture We all wanted to get something truly tangible and useful from everyone in the team to help mold a positive team mentality and ensure that all team members get their opinion. The idea behind the charter is that it will grow organically as the team evolves.
- Iain As part of the launch of our new brand, our company has tweaked its tone of voice. Spearheaded by our ever busy Marketing team (shout out to Jane) tone of voice workshops and get togethers were held with the wider OpenAthens team. Borrowing influence from these sessions our service desk is now trying to be more human and offer a less scripted customer experience. Within our brand there are 3 key values - Make it simple’, ‘be of service’ and ‘lead the way’ Those 3 values influenced the creation and feel of the charter It’s less like a document or bulleted list. We wanted to convey our message in a much more graphical and colourful way
- Iain So…. What it is and what it isn’t. Let me start by telling you what it’s not.
- Iain It’s definitely not an SLA document, it’s not an operational document. We do have one but this isn’t it. SLA’s tend to be a bit stuffy, wordy and aren't really designed to be read. Our charter is the complete opposite And now what it is
- Iain Ours Charter is easy read, to the point, and an overview of our team, and our mentality. It promotes our culture and positive team behaviours that best serve our customers. It’s a promise of how we’ll serve you, that isn’t metrics driven.
- Joe It gives you the opportunity to tell us what we’re doing well and where we’re not doing so well. If your experience isn’t what we’ve outlined in the charter then please feed this back to us and use the charter to let us know where we’ve let you down. Of course if we’ve done well we’d love to hear that too!
- Joe The charter is very new! So we haven’t got the best view on all of the benefits yet but we’re excited to see what you think of it. We’ve always aimed to respond to a ticket as soon as possible and make sure that the content of our responses is useful and as previously mentioned, easy to understand. Now we want to make sure you’re updated with all the goings on more frequently where relevant. It’s good for people that join our service desk to understand how the team have run until now and we believe the charter underlines that quite nicely. This feels like an internal benefit but it gives them an idea of the vibe we’d like them to give off and that then benefits you. The amount of feedback has increased but as previously mentioned we’d love to receive more. There’s always room for improvement! And while we’ve stated that this isn’t a marketing tool, the charter makes it easier for our international sales team to show what we do and the kind of support you’ll receive.
- Joe Based on everything we’ve spoken about today, we hope it’s clear how we work, how we want to work and where we want to go. None of this is possible without you so we really appreciate any help you’re able to give us in terms of feedback!
- Joe For those that don’t know, we’ve extended our opening hours. We used to be 9-5:30 GMT. We’ve increased our operating hours by 80% to what you can see on this slide. These new opening hours are a step in the right direction for a high level of support no matter where you are in the world. That’s our goal. Extending the opening hours is a start to that.
- On behalf of the whole support team, thank you for listening. Our contact details are here on the screen if you would like to contact us about today. Next on the agenda