15 Questions To Ask When You’re Auditing Your District’s SaaS Solutions

Traditional help desk and ticketing workflows have become obsolete, and many SaaS solutions used in school districts are outdated or redundant.

As you plan for your district’s digital transformation, there’s never been a better time to audit your existing technology. With the right platform, school districts can create efficiencies, consolidate technologies, and make it easier to serve all stakeholders — including multilingual families and families with limited internet access.

As you conduct your audit, use these questions to guide you toward providing better experiences and engagement for your district’s stakeholders.

When schools transitioned to remote learning, the list of adults who assisted students with schoolwork expanded substantially. Extended family members — like grandparents — now make up a significant percentage of the stakeholders submitting tickets. 

Moving forward, school IT departments will continue serving a variety of stakeholders with varying knowledge of technology. This makes an enterprise-wide solution critical for handling tickets efficiently, including inquiries that may have been sent to the wrong department.

A few key questions to ask:

1. How are ticketing workflows managed?
2. Could your systems be streamlined to improve communications — internally and externally?
3. Is IT support accessible to all stakeholders, including those without internet access or advanced technology skills?
4. Does your department have a strategy to quickly and easily reroute tickets, including those that are not intended for IT?
5. Does your IT system support multilingual families?

In a constantly shifting educational landscape, real-time data can reveal needs and trends — helping IT departments better understand how to improve customer service districtwide. K-12 SaaS tools that provide predictive analytics can become a one-stop shop for school district leaders.

A few key questions to ask:

1. How often does your department analyze data about tickets, customer service, engagement, and satisfaction?
2. How could data about your school district’s stakeholders influence your department’s communications strategy?
3. What data is not currently available that may need to be collected moving forward?

Email is one of the most targeted vulnerabilities hackers try to gain access to, with historically rudimentary and easily breached encryption conventions. District websites with publicly listed private email accounts on a website is an invitation to costly cyber breaches and phishing attacks.

In addition, stakeholders will often send their concern to the wrong email address, or copy multiple addresses on a single issue — further clogging inboxes and again creating lack of accountability as to who “owns” the request.

A few key questions to ask:

1. How do your stakeholders currently contact district leaders?
2. Are email addresses publicly listed on your website?
3. How do you ensure accountability in ensuring stakeholders receive fast, accurate responses to their inquiries?

Internal and external stakeholders expect Amazon-level customer service, and superior customer service are more important than ever for school districts — especially as options for families expand through school choice programs, charter schools, and virtual schools.

Delivering superior customer service is not about one person or one department. Everyone has to work together to deliver a positive experience for every stakeholder, at every touchpoint.

Consider these questions as you think about customer service:

1. What can you do to ensure your IT department is delivering superior customer service to all stakeholders?
2. Are you measuring engagement and satisfaction?
3. How is your department supporting families who speak different languages or have limited internet access?
4. How are you ensuring your customer service and communications are inclusive and accessible?

A lot has changed in education, and your SaaS solution audit is a great first step. After conducting a comprehensive review of your district’s needs and existing software solutions, it’s important to review platforms and solutions that may better meet your district’s needs.

K12 Insight delivers the only customer service and intelligence platform purpose-built for education. We help district leaders strengthen trust and deliver superior customer service by:

• Supporting districtwide goals for better communication, collaboration, transparency, equity, and engagement
• Streamlining all inbound communications in one, unified inbox
• Revealing needs and trends in real-time so you can make proactive decisions for your departments and district