Service Desk Plus
Civil Air Patrol – California Wing
Who is Civil Air Patrol?
The Civil Air Patrol is a Nonprofit 501(c) (3) organization with three (3) primary missions Cadet Programs, Aerospace Education and Emergency Services. We have some 3500+ members in the California Wing that are involved in some way with one of those three (3) missions. Our all-volunteer Information Technology department is responsible for working with many of these members to support, maintain and implement different types of technology and/or infrastructure. With a geographic area as large as ours we have many different people involved in fulfilling those requests for support, maintenance and implementation. More information on our history can be found at the National Civil Air Patrol Website.
How ServiceDesk Plus Helped Civil Air Patrol – California Wing?
We needed a system that would allow us to centrally manage all of these requests. When we evaluated the ServiceDesk Plus product, we immediately saw the power of this application. Important features for us were the ability to automatically route incoming requests directly to a technician. Another feature we desired was the ability to keep not just technicians but our members (customers) informed on the progress of their requests.
ServiceDesk Plus offers us a wide range of different notification options so that we can provide different levels of notification based on our needs. As with most technology support departments we found ourselves answering the same questions multiple times which made the Knowledge Base feature very important to us as well. As we are all volunteers being able to focus on larger projects can be difficult at times. However having the ServiceDesk Plus application handle some of the more mundane questions by giving the member tools to find the answer on their own will save us a lot of time. Finally, the ability to create custom templates for different types of requests was something we very much appreciated. Being able to ask a different set of questions for each request type saves time and frustration for our membership and our technicians. It allows us to get the proper information from the requester when the request is created instead of spending additional time collecting information the member may/may not know was needed in order to handle their request.
