The National University of Singapore (NUS) is one of the island nation's largest educational institutions, serving more than 23,000 undergraduate and about 9,000 graduate students. NUS provides a range of academic degrees and is also a center for national and international research.

NUS already had a well-developed IT infrastructure to support its students and faculty. However, its IT department needed to solve one major issue: The IT help desk handled about 4,000 calls a month, a volume that strained the school's IT resources.

During the start of each academic quarter, the volume of help desk calls nearly doubled due to requests from incoming students and students studying abroad. The increased workload put enormous pressure on IT department resources. Making the situation worse, the university's IT infrastructure included a mix of computing technologies that made it difficult to find unified solutions for user issues. The school's IT staff needed to optimize its support methodology; consolidate help desk operations; lower the average duration of help desk calls; increase user satisfaction levels; and reduce the school's total IT support costs.

NUS decided to work with IBM Global Technology Services to provide the students and staff with fast, seamless help desk service through an onsite single point of contact (SPOC) solution. Using a combination of onsite resources and a dedicated team of IBM technical analysts, the IBM Global Technology Services team provides support for client, server, network and operating system environments; handles and logs help desk calls; and documents user problems.

The IBM Global Technology Services team also provides services that help maintain high levels of customer satisfaction. For example, IBM compiles online guides outlining IT services and provides incoming freshmen with a mobile support kiosk that addresses some of the most commonly asked questions and issues faced by new users. The team conducts monthly meetings to provide service updates with the university's management staff and to obtain user feedback, which is used to help improve operations.

With the SPOC solution, NUS has improved service quality and obtained consistently excellent customer satisfaction levels. The onsite SPOC help desk offers convenient and flexible services for walk-in and counter-service customers, and it offers prompt service through onsite dispatch engineers. With the SPOC solution, NUS has also increased the efficiency and accuracy of its problem resolution, averaging a call duration of five minutes or less and consistently meeting its service requirements. The number of help desk calls has fallen by an average of 15 percent. Moreover, the university was able to offer extended support for users who need help after normal business hours.