Wodonga TAFE

How the TAFE empowers staff and students with TOPdesk’s self-service portal

Getting Wodonga TAFE back to what matters most 

Supporting 10,000 students and staff, the Wodonga TAFE ICT department was often tied up with administrative and routine enquiries, and internal processes could be disjointed and confusing.

“Before we had TOPdesk, from my experience it was kind of a mess of urgent requests and walk-ups creating a massive backlog that I would write up on sticky notes all over my monitor,” says Wodonga TAFE Information Technology Officer Jacob Chant.

At the same time, the TAFE  recognized it needed a centralized self-service portal for staff and students that would be integrated across different departments.

“We had built in-house products in the past, and none of them have sufficed until we found TOPdesk,”  says Wodonga TAFE ICT team leader Dean Callaghan.

Ultimately, Wodonga TAFE wanted an “out-of-the-box” solution that could be tailored to serve its thriving community – so the TAFE could get on with the business of education.

Implementing an integrated enterprise service management system

“When it comes to collaboration and communication, TOPdesk was there from the very beginning. We were guided throughout the process, which successfully delivered the design and implementation we needed,” says Dean

The self-service portal began to transform how Wodonga TAFE supports its learning community with ICT issues.

But Wodonga TAFE didn’t stop there.

The TAFE integrated TOPdesk across the  organization for a complete enterprise service management system. Joining ICT, the facilities, human resources and marketing departments jumped on board to become operators within TOPdesk.

Wodonga TAFE then implemented TOPdesk’s Asset Management module to effectively track 9726 assets. Further expanding the platform’s capabilities, they integrated TOPdesk with Microsoft’s enterprise mobility management service Intune to support secure home working and online learning.

Creating satisfied end-users

Students and staff now use a single web-based self-service portal for IT and academic requests – with a customer and end-user satisfaction rate of 95%.

“Staff and students who operate within TOPdesk have nothing but good things to say,” says Dean.

To assist staff and students, as well as aid workflow, over 150 ‘how-to’ style articles were published in a knowledge library to address common service requests.

The articles generated huge download figures and positive feedback from the Wodonga TAFE  community.

“The self-service portal empowers our staff and students to solve issues on their own,” says Dean.

Higher return on investment

Using TOPdesk gave Wodonga TAFE a higher return on investment for their service management than previous solutions.

“The ability to create a comprehensive ticket is really handy,” explains Jacob. “For example, in 2020 a major issue prevented 70% of users from working and exponentially increased the volume of phone calls. However, with TOPdesk in place we were able to quickly sort out incidents.

“Overall, we’ve seen a 50% decrease in ticket resolution time.”

“The TOPdesk platform blended in seamlessly with our intranet and staffnet for end-users to access. So, that made a massive difference compared to some of the older systems we had.”

Promoting easier collaboration

Since onboarding the ICT, facilities, human resources and marketing departments, Wodonga TAFE has leveraged TOPdesk to improve internal collaboration.

Using the same system across departments makes internal processes consistent, which creates less ambiguity for staff.

“Having a centralized system has made communication between the IT department and other departments much more straightforward,” says Jacob.

Celebrating TOPdesk’s success

Wodonga TAFE continues to see increased adoption of TOPdesk throughout the organization with students and staff using TOPdesk as their first point of contact to resolve issues, request equipment and book rooms all from one centralized, easy-to-use self-service portal.

Wodonga TAFE has shown that working as one enterprise with a central system truly empowers departments and users to maximize time and resources, making for happier staff and students.