Feb 26 2009
Help desk ROI? Where are the numbers?
Last week while on a plane to a conference, I had a chance to read through the latest edition of Campus Technology.
There was an interesting article entitled, Help Desk Is Spelled: R-O-I. The article highlighted a couple schools, but mainly focused on LSU. In 2007, LSU launched an internal marketing campaign within their IT department encouraging students to learn more about new technologies available and to be smart about using them – focusing a lot on security issues, etc.
The campaign included a cartoon character named Tad who had the misfortune of being computer-security illiterate and getting himself and the institution into all sorts of mischief because of his shortcomings.
The message is “don’t be a Tad” and the goal of the campaign was to get students to be more responsible when it comes to their own computers by installing recommended anti-virus and spyware applications.
When I read the article, I thought, “what a great idea, I wonder if it worked.”
So I read, and read, and read. And they never told me if it worked. Besides a quote of it “worked wonders,” there were no metrics to speak of.
Quite possibly Campus Technology just never mentioned it, but I’m wondering if LSU ever tracked the campaign. Whether the article meant to or not, it mentions the goal of the campaign:
… driving users to take full advantage of new technology rollouts, and not sapping or overburdening help desk resources because users are not fully versed in and encouraged to use the new tools.
Later the article states:
… the campaign was designed specifically to get students to take advantage of an outsourced creditmonitoring service from Equifax and antivirus technology from Symantec, to keep endpoints secure.
Great start, but did the campaign meet the goal?
- How many click-throughs were there from the campaign posters, billboards, bus ads, and other off-site elements?
- Did specific media types work better than others?
- How many users converted by downloading the anti-virus apps?
- Did help desk call volume decrease?
- Did virus issues decrease across campus?
- How much money was saved by the decrease in call volume and virus issues?
Was the campaign working? Did it need to be tweaked to get the point across more effectively?
It’s odd to me that the title and content of the article consistently mention ROI, but we never find out how much the school actually saved by implementing the awareness campaign.
Again, the campaign may have been tracked. My point is only that if it was tracked, I wish Campus Technology had reported on its success beyond saying that it “worked wonders.”
I read the same article while doing research for my organization on the ROI of helpdesk and stumbled upon that article. It was pretty interesting, but as you said – where were the metrics? I was looking for that too! So I guess you’re not the only one wondering how effective their campaign was.
Lisa
Thanks for the comment, Lisa, and sorry for my delayed reply.
Yes, it is a shame that they didn’t even *mention* any metrics. When Campus Technology quoted the head of the campaign as saying something like, “it worked wonders,” I thought they were going to dive into some ROI … click-throughs, how issues had decreased by x%, something. No such luck, as you know.
Like I said in the post, the schools could very well have used metrics and the magazine just didn’t find a reason to show them. Or, the school may not have measured. Who knows. Either way, it was disappointing.