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The college or university helpdesk is probably one of the most important sites for current students. What user behaviors should you track to make sure your helpdesk site is useful?

For the purpose of this post, I’m assuming that your helpdesk site has either no analytics tool installed or, if it does, you are currently not doing anything with the data.

So, let’s get started.

Let’s say your helpdesk site includes:

1. tutorials or instructions for using university systems
2. an alert system
3. a ticketing system for users to enter issues
4. FAQs/knowledge-base

There are many more aspects to any university helpdesk site, but let’s use these four to start.


Installing the code. Before you do anything, install some analytics code and get some benchmarking data. If you don’t have code installed, there are many free tools out there. I would recommend Google Analytics for a couple of reasons. It’s probably the most robust free tool out there today and it’s probably the most universally used free tools.  Why would that second part matter? Because the support community is huge.

If you’re installing Google Analytics, follow the basic setup tips suggested by Kyle James at his blog. He outlines some great tips for those just starting out with Google Analytics.

Pay attention to your callers. Helpdesk sites are unique. They really are customer service websites. So, it’s important to pay attention not only to what your website users are doing, but also to what your actual callers are asking. Compare what your callers are asking and website user behavior. Is there a gap? I’ll go into this in more depth later in the post.

Create a quick survey. If you’re just starting, it’s important to know what on your site is popular with your users and what they like/dislike. It’s very easy to set up a quick survey.

Although you can just have a link to the survey/feedback form on your site, actively promoting your survey will give you better results. I know what you’re thinking - “I *hate* those pop up surveys! I never fill those out.” Remember, though, that you’re not your target audience. You’ll also be surprised at how many users fill out your survey. Seriously.

If you do use the active method, think about using 4Q from iPerceptions for these reasons:

1. It’s free and takes about 10 minutes to create.
2. All plug-n-play, you simply add a line of code to your site.
3. You can control how many users receive the invitation.

Why should you use the *active* survey approach instead of just putting a link to a survey on your site?

1. It will take you less time to get results.
2. Here’s the big reason why - passive surveys or feedback (ones your users initiate by going and finding the link) will give you mostly negative feedback. Why? Because average users almost never go hunting for the feedback/survey link unless they are having a bad experience. If you ask up front if the user would be willing to fill out a survey at the end of their visit, you’ll get both negative *and* positive feedback.

It is as important to get positive feedback as it is to get negative feedback. If you only know what you’re doing wrong, how can you continue to do the right things right?

Any survey/feedback form is better than nothing, though, so if the active approach isn’t right for your site, then create a short form and put the link in your footer or another appropriate place.

Ok, enough of that. Onto the helpdesk …

Tutorials and instructions. Which ones are the most important to the student, faculty, or staff? Do you know?

1. How many visits are you getting to each tutorial? (Visit Report) Using the visit trend, you will quickly be able to tell which tutorial is used most and when (maybe at the beginning of the semester?). You may see such an increase that you may want to make the tutorial more prominent on your site at specific times of year or semester. Please note: just because a particular tutorial is the most clicked on doesn’t mean it’s necessarily what users want. Maybe the users can’t find the one they want. This is why surveys are so important.
2. When the user finds the tutorial, are they making it through the entire tutorial? (Goal Conversion Reports) Using a goal conversion funnel, you can see how far your user got into the tutorial. Why is this important? You can focus on which stage of your tutorial may not be effective (where users are *falling out*).

One thing you can measure to see if users *are* finding the tutorial they need is the time spent within the tutorial. Are they clicking and immediately abandoning? This might be a red flag saying that the particular tutorial isn’t the one they were looking for.

Alert System. Most likely your alert system includes alerts for everything from scheduled system outages to virus alerts. Whatever the use, it’s important that the information gets out to users. You may be sending emails or text messages for important alerts. That’s fantastic. Here are a few metrics you might use to see if your alert system is effective:

1. Are users actively asking for your alerts? (RSS Feed Tracking) Track your RSS feeds using feedburner. Are people using them? If not, find out why. Do users understand RSS? Should you create a tutorial about RSS feeds and how to use them?
2. Which type of alerts are the most popular? (Popular Pages Report/Content Report) If your most important alerts are not your most visited, should you make them more prominent? Are they in technical language that users may not understand?

Ticketing System. If your ticketing system is public-facing (users can enter issues themselves) and web-based, you can add your analytics code to the system to see if users drop off anywhere within the system.

1. Are users using your ticketing system? (Visit Report)
2. How many of the users that initiated a ticket followed through and actually submitted one? (Goal Conversion Reports)

If your ticketing system has search capabilities, take a look at the internal search keywords used. You can start to get an idea from these keywords what users are having issues with as well (even if they do not actually submit a ticket).

FAQ/Knowledge-base. How are users finding your content? What content are they searching for? You can get this data on both a standard FAQ page (with in-page *jump* links), or with your knowledge-base.

1. Which FAQs are users clicking on? (ClickMap or Site Overlay) By using your site overlay you can see where users are clicking and quickly see which FAQs are the most click on.
2. Which questions in the knowledge-base are users searching for? (Internal Knowledge-Base Site Search) Studying the keywords users type in to get to answers within your knowledge-base can be very enlightening. What type of language are they using? Incorporate that language into your responses. This also might give you insight into a language shift within other parts of your site. Remember that your users, generally are not as technically savvy as you, so studying the keywords *they* use will give you ideas about how to re-word some things within your knowledge-base *and* within your site.

Studying user behavior for your overall helpdesk site is important as well. How do users search for your content? What is your visit-FAQ(knowledge-base) ratio? If you have an overall internal site search, what is your visit-to-search ratio? Are most users using search or trying to navigate through the site using navigation or content links?

It’s important to re-iterate the importance of a survey or feedback form on helpdesk sites. Why? Because your most visited tutorials, FAQs, knowledge-base questions, etc., may actually *not* be the top demanded content. How would you know that? What should bring up a red flag?

1. You see a gap between the most visited pages/questions/alerts and:
   1. what your users are saying in your survey,
   2. the keywords your users are typing into your internal site search, or
   3. the questions your users are asking when they actually *call* the helpdesk

If there is a discrepancy, some reasons may be:

1. The language you’re using is too technical (experiment with changing the language and see if that gap closes up). Users can find the links, but don’t click because they don’t know the terms.
2. Your language is fine, but the site is difficult to navigate.
3. Both 1 and 2.

So there you go. Some examples of how analytics can help a university or college helpdesk site. Of course there are so many more, but this post is already running a bit too long. Any other ideas? Please share your thoughts.

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