No, the provider of help desk and customer support services to colleges and universities has done just fine through referrals and trade shows, thank you very much.
Maybe that’s because college kids have lots of questions — things like how to connect with the dorm’s wireless network or how to perform a task in Microsoft Excel. Maybe it’s also because Perceptis’ services seem so naturally a part of the institutional environment.
When a student calls the university help desk, a Perceptis employee answers, “Help desk, how may I help you?” If Perceptis is providing switchboard support to State U., an employee answers the phone using the school’s name.
“Every time we touch a client, that has to be a great experience,” says Bill Bradfield, the company’s founder and CEO. “That’s our goal.”
And it is working. For the past four years, the company’s business has grown 60 percent each year.
Students can call the Perceptis-run help desk 24/7/365 and receive a response within a half hour.
Perceptis also provides students with different communication avenues: call centers, chat, e-mail and a self-help portal called SmartiPantz, which provides online answers to frequently and not-so-frequently asked questions about password resets, connecting to the school network or accessing course management systems. As more questions are posed and answered, the SmartiPantz knowledge center grows with it.
“People deserve to get help in the most convenient way for them,” Bradfield says.
On the university side, Perceptis’ data collection and analysis helps schools eliminate recurring IT problems. For example, Case Western Reserve University students used to have trouble resetting their system-entry passwords, which routinely prompted calls to the school’s help desk. With Perceptis’ help, the school invested in an automated password reset program, which cut down on the calls and the costs associated with it.
“If you can eliminate reasons for people to call, you’re doing better,” Bradfield says.
At Arizona State University, Perceptis professionalized the school’s tech support by providing round-the-clock phone and e-mail assistance for the same cost it was paying for tech support from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., according to Adrian Sannier, vice president and university technology officer in the division of computing studies at ASU.
“Students expect service and answers at any time of day at any place,” Bradfield says. “They have these same expectations of the colleges and universities they attend.”
Some clients, for example, were experiencing hang-up rates of up to 80 percent due to inadequate service, Bradfield says. Perceptis has been able to cut that number down to 4 to 6 percent in some cases.
Perceptis, which employs about 150 people in offices in Cleveland, Phoenix and another to come in Virginia, is Bradfield’s sixth startup. The company hatched in 2004 when Lev Gonick, vice president of information technology and CIO at Case Western Reserve University, asked Bradfield to look at the school’s IT-related problems.
The investment in training, hardware, software and the IT help desk was not where CWRU wanted to spend its resources, Bradfield says. “That was when I thought it was a good idea to build a company,” he says.
Perceptis started out handling just IT-related problems, but in some cases it’s now manning the switchboard and taking calls about financial aid and human resources.
“We want to help schools resolve customer service issues,” Bradfield says. “We want to help them with student recruitment and retention. If we can provide information about how students are being dealt with, that can help schools retain more students.”
The company is even hoping to provide more student information services, such as arranging for child care, managing parking passes and acting as a ticket agent for schools’ performance venues. And that’s going to mean changes for Perceptis.
“We’ll soon build a sales force to ramp up the business heavily,” Bradfield says.