Canterbury Christ Church University is reconfiguring the support services it offers to students and staff in a major new initiative that brings together seven separate support functions across its campus network. The Kent higher education establishment, the largest in the county for public services education, has gone live with the Sostenuto IT service management system from Sunrise Software to provide a new first point of contact for 15,000 students, and, ultimately, 1,500 staff.
The new support function, dubbed the i-Zone, will be managed by the University’s Integrated Support Services team, with technical assistance from Corporate Information Services, and will bring together second line support functions including Registry, Student Accommodation, Student Finance, Library Services, Computer Services, the International Office and Student Support and Guidance. The first three services have just gone live and will be closely followed by the others, including internal IT support in the New Year. Further down the line, the system will be integrated with the University’s intranet so students and academic staff can log their own queries online.
Sostenuto was chosen because of its powerful support for complex business rules, providing the ability to determine how queries are dealt with and what data different sets of users are given access to. Previous call logging systems were not designed to keep track of the complex process flows that the University now needs to deal with for the different types of broad ranging queries. “We wanted the new system to help us ensure we could take ownership of a student query from when the initial call is taken to when the query is resolved in each of the different areas, in line with our policy of putting the needs of our students first,” said Elaine Hopkins, Information Systems Development Manager at Canterbury Christ Church University.
Tom Weston, Executive Chairman of Sunrise Software, said: “Large universities are like major corporates in the range and complexity of service queries their support staff have to deal with. To handle this complexity they require systems that are easily configurable to support the full range of services they offer. One of the great strengths of Sostenuto is that it can be easily adapted to the way you want to deliver support services.”