UUM Service Desk System and Customer Satisfaction Farah Dina Mohd. Khairuldin Othman Yeop Abdullah Graduate School of Business College of Business Universiti Utara Malaysia 06010 Sintok Kedah Darul Aman E-mail: myway3406@yahoo.com Tel: +60194582774 Abstract This paper studies about Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) Service Desk System and Customer Satisfaction. In terms of the research questions set out in this project, tree area are identified. This are follows by its objectives such as to explore whether information can be made available using UUM helpdesk system, to find out the most problems and to investigate whether customer satisfaction has influenced from helpdesk system. Keywords: UUM Service Desk System and Customer Satisfaction, Service Desk System 1.1 Introduction The goal of this research project is to investigate whether there is a direct relationship between customer satisfaction and the use of ITIL. Another concern is to determine whether satisfaction shows that effective service delivery. We found that both customer satisfaction and operational performance enhancing activities within the framework of ITIL increased. Increased use ITIL framework is therefore result in increased customer satisfaction and operational performance (JH Botha, 2004). 1.2 Problem of Statement There have been many complaints and requests of services that happen to University Utara Malaysia, especially on IT infrastructure such as problem of official e-mails and other related UUM system services. Since then UUM has been started using ticketing system to capture customer reports and UUM management need to know whether this will significantly help to ease customer s complaints and from time to time will reduce such repeated problems having by customers. 1.3 Objectives of the study Specifically the objectives of this study are: i. The purpose of this question is to explore whether information can be made available using UUM helpdesk system. ii. The purpose of this question is to find out the most problems that UUM customer are facing. iii. The purpose of this question is to investigate whether customer satisfaction has influenced from helpdesk system. 57
1.4 Significance of study This study will help measure the level of customer satisfaction toward University currently served to their customer. Potentially this study may lead to identification of previously unknown problems and to have better understanding and discovery of the way today trends towards giving services and solve customer problems. institutes already comply and performed to customer service including department s associates with it. 2.3 Experience-Judge-Feel-Act framework It is based on our unique Experience-Judge-Feel-Act framework designed and the framework was developed after reviewing the academic literature on customer satisfaction as well as recent studies on customer loyalty and engagement. Organization can have better understanding and management of problem solving and services and this will help them to make good decision and well plan for future investment. There has been much research and discussion conducted on these matters. Most of the research found was on customer satisfactions and its components. 2.0 Literature Review 2.1 Service Desk System A service desk capability is accessible by customers of the service desk, the customers including external customers, e- commerce customers, and global customers. The service desk includes means for solving problems and incidents reported, and also means for tracking and reporting the service desk's performance in solving the problems and incidents. A method for providing the service desk capability is also disclosed (Karen Riley, 2002) 2.2 Customer Satisfaction Turban, Lee, King, and Chung (2002) asked the reader about what customer service in university settings should look like. Customer service can be defined as a series of activities to help enhance customer satisfaction. Satisfaction can be defined as the fulfillment of needed services or product that met customer s expectation. Most of our educational More research and testing is required to gain a better understanding the relationship between customer satisfaction and service desk ticketing system. It is important to conduct more studies on the results and reasons this two are related. 3.0 Methodology The unit of analysis is the major entity that is being analyzed in a study. It is the 'what' or 'who' that is being studied. In social science research, typical units of analysis include individuals (most common), groups, social organizations and social artifacts. 3.1 Research Design Research design has been define by Mouton (2005) as a plan or blueprint on how to conduct the research. Olivier (2004), Meyers (2003) and Mouton (2005) have provide us with literature the definition on research design layout that follow two principles that is: To define research questions. To determine research approach and strategy. 58
3.2 Defining Research Questions Olivier (2004) has point out that research questions need to be determine first as derived from the research problem. Mouton (2005) also supported this statement when he stated that formulation of research problems through questions will help focusing the research problem. He also distinguishes between non-empirical and empirical questions. The non-empirical questions are defined as question about entities and for empirical questions can be defined as questions that can address real-life problems. From the research problems for this study, research questions has been derived and therefore the definition of nonempirical questions can be complied since it will answer customer satisfaction. Empirical questions need to have answered by observations in which many people agree on them. In order to achieve the research objectives, the nonempirical research questions need to be answered. i.the sampling methods can generated less biased result because directly retrieved from the system and comes from email complaint or phone direct to point of contact whereas directly being recorded by outside the involved department. ii. The sampling methods helps categorized problems by its types of problems and service request and also complaint from customers. iii. The sampling methods will capture all data into structured databases and being able to process reports for further investigation. 3.5 Sampling Design Population The aim of the research project was to ascertain if a direct correlation exists between customer s satisfaction and the use of service desk system. The population of interest for this research are the students, staff and public people who have become customers for the Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM), Malaysia. 3.3 Determining the Research Approach 3.6 Target Population (Sample Size) Research approach should be adopted to be more appropriate in conducting this research study. The approach of this research that being determined will based on research questions defined. The objective of the research approach is to enable the researcher to answer the research questions (Mouton, 2005 & Olivier, 2004). 3.4 Data Collection Procedures Advantage of the Sampling Design. In this research, researcher will collects the data from tickets regarding complaints, service request and problems that were being recorded in the system. This is because, in order to analyses the effectiveness of the system toward customer satisfactions, time to resolved, calls log per user, number of users to services. Hence, the appropriate unit of analysis in this study is customer s ticket in Service Desk system in Universiti Utara Malaysia. 3.7 Sampling Frame The advantages of the researcher sampling design are mentioned as below: The main methods used in this survey research is nonprobability sampling. This is because there are variables 59
need to be taken (such as cost, time, availability, and what you think about the results). The two methods of its characteristics are listed below. Nonprobability sampling is suitable for event such as population list is not available exhaustively. Another thing is that some units are unable to be selected, therefore you will not know the effect and size of sampling error (unequal representation, missed sample, etc.). list of UUM customer, then you can have all tickets being recorded along the way. All individuals ticket samples can have exactly the same probability within population, or else we get less satisfactory forms of samples. This we could conclude that it is a non-probability sample because it will only involve customers that only sent report through ticketing system. Non probability sampling effectively can help to build ideas and gives feedback, however it can t be generalize because of the results do not have high level of confidence to an entire population. Lastly, for the purpose of this research, this sampling will be the best is more suitable and cheapest for this paper, but it does mean that nonprobability samples cannot depend upon the rationale of probability theory. 3.9 Unit of Analysis The unit of analysis is the major entity that is being analyzed in a study. It is the 'what' or 'who' that is being studied. In social science research, typical units of analysis include individuals (most common), groups, social organizations and social artifacts. The non-tickets customer from the service desk systems will be excluded in this study. The selection of only created tickets is important because, they are representing customer that have most problem to address to. It show the real problems that UUM need to cater in order to deliver good customer satisfactions. In addition, these research might give them the better understanding and knowledge in term of ITIL Best Practices influence on customer satisfaction. 3.8 Sampling Technique Sampling frame is a complete list of all members inside the population of tickets that we wish to study upon. As an example, if we want to look into and study reasoning for underlying factors that cause customer to have satisfaction towards your population in this case UUM, we would need to know every members of all people of UUM community in that area. But with help desk system, we can look from the For this research, researcher will use tickets in UUM Service Desk system as unit of analysis. The data collected will be based on organization s customer which are from UUM students, UUM staffs consist of administrative and lecturers and as well as people outside UUM. 3.10 Type of Study The type of study involve in this research is non experimental studies or also called observational, and this is due to this research intend merely to observe what happens, Researcher will look for existing problem being reported inside the system and this is as they exist in the real world because we are looking into real problem being reported by customers. Descriptive design is used to develop theories, identify problems with current practices, justify current practices, 60
make judgments, or determine other practices in similar That is when the product and service had reached level of situations. self-feeling customer s expectation. Most of our higher education institutes along with the departments inside it 4.0 Research Framework already performed their customer service dedicated to provide student s services. Customer satisfaction increased The research framework will measure based on three factors with the introduction of helpdesk system in UUM. that is Responsiveness, Quality of Communications and Service Desk system. It will be test against customer 4.2 Timeframe satisfaction. Tentative Timescale 4.3 Challenges & How to encounter H1: Responsiveness has a relationship with Customer Satisfaction. H2: Quality of communications has a relationship with Customer Satisfaction. H3: Service Desk has a moderating effect on Responsiveness and Customer Satisfaction H4: Service Desk has a moderating effect on Quality of communications and Customer Satisfaction. 4.1 Conceptual Definition Turban, Lee, King, and Chung (2002) asked about what customer service in higher education settings will look like should. Customer service is list of activities that is design to enhance the level of customer satisfaction. The biggest challenges of selecting the right sample for researcher interest are to find out right information to process into research design. Elements of data are quite difficult to select to meet objectivity for the study. Finding the right way to extract the data and to process it is the main task here and therefore, the result might be not accurate as what research objectives needed. Particular Sampling Problems to Encounter and How to Deal With These Problems. Even though researcher select the data directly from the system itself, there might be some issue that can occurred while collecting or executing the reports. As most of the tickets are coming from email, they might be problem in order to identify exactly who are the owner of the emails. Furthermore there are possibilities that email may came from unknown sources that deliberately attempt to spam the system. This is not a genuine UUM customer that may disturb our data collections. 61
The best steps to encounter these problem are, researcher can [3] O Manony, K., & Garavan, T. N. (2012). direct contact the service agent to help removing unnecessary Implementing a quality management framework in a higher data from the system itself. One way to resolve the matter is education organization: A case study. Quality Assurance in through some help from IT department in UUM to help Education, 20(20), 184-200. installing security devices to filtering those spam email. Besides, researcher also can follow up through service desk [4] Zinledin, M., Akdag, H. C., & Vasicheva, V. system owner to help make this problem contained. (2011). Assessing quality in higher education: new criteria for evaluating student s satisfaction. Quality in higher 4.4 Conclusion education, 17(2), 231-243. With today s technology, people can benefit from it to manage company s services and problems regarding services to customer until satisfaction shows among customer that effective service has been delivered. [5] Zhu, Z., Nakata, C., Sivakumar, K., & Grewal, D. (2013). Fix it or leave it? Customer recovery form selfservice technology failures. Journal of Retailing, 89(1), 15-29. With the introduction of UUM Service Desk, Customer satisfaction is measure against responsiveness of ticket being handle and quality of communication to solve the request for solving problem or services between UUM and their customer. The proposed methodology in this paper is an attempt to identify some guidelines and formulate a life-cycle approach to assisting enterprises in planning and developing better problem and services management in the future. Hopefully the methodology may also help researchers identify areas where further research may be called for. References [1] Tax, S. S., & Brown, S. W. (2012). Recovering and learning from service failure. Sloan Management. [2] Wilkins, S., & Stephens Balakrishnan, M.(2013). Assessing student satisfaction in transnational higher education. International Journal of Educational Management, 27(2), 143-156. [6] Lehto, A., Toivonen, L., & livonen, M. (2012). University library premises: The evaluation of customer satisfaction and usage. na. [7] Jaffe, L. H. (2014). Evaluating Faculty and Staff Customer Satisfaction of a Technology Support Office in a Large University in Florida (Doctoral dissertation, University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida). [8] Conger, S., Hefley, W. E., Galup, S., & Dattero, R. (2012). Service Quality Measurement: Past and Future. [9] Dahlstrom, E., Brooks, D. C., & Bichsel, J. (2014). The Current Ecosystem of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education: Student, Faculty, and IT Perspectives (p. 3). Research report. Louisville, CO: ECAR, September 2014. Available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar. 2014 EDUCAUSE. CC by-nc-nd. [10] Parahoo, S. K., Harvey, H. L., & Tamim, R. M. (2013). Factors influencing student satisfaction in universities in the Gulf region: does gender of students 62
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