After three months of operation, Information Technology’s Customer Service Center has received so many calls that the staff recently published their own top ten list on the Internet to respond to common questions about computers, center officials say.

Center Director Michael Schwartz said the list, which answers questions the center’s staff hears every day, is one of the many ways the center staff works to make themselves unnecessary and let the machines do more of the work. He said through new telephone technology, web pages and an electronic knowledge base, computers will be answering questions about computers more and more frequently at the center.

Schwartz said the center has received about 1,000 calls a month since they opened in early October, and he expects that number to increase. The center surveys callers daily to continuously improve its service.

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We follow up our help by asking callers how they feel about the help they received, he said. The response is very good. One of the few complaints involves our limited hours, and I guess that says good things about the quality of the help as well.

The center is open 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday through Friday, but answers to many questions the desk regularly responds to can be found 24 hours a day on the World Wide Web. The CSC home page is located at http://www.siu.edu/csc. There the center has posted answers to the most frequently asked questions the office receives.

Currently the center handles about of 72 percent of its calls in-house, in which someone at the center is able to solve the caller’s problem on the spot. Schwartz said just because no one at the center knows the answer to a particular question does not mean help will not be found the help desk doesn’t pass the buck, it retains ownership of a problem until it is solved.

We are the open end of a problem-solving funnel where the search for a solution begins, he said. Next we take the question to Information Technology and their experts. If that doesn’t work, we have a third tier of people, the vendors like Microsoft or IBM. Wherever the answer lies, we find it rather than referring the caller to someone else.

Schwartz said the center is still developing and bringing in new technology to improve its capabilities.

We have two components we must improve:technology and the human side, he said. On the technology side, we are implementing a call tracking system a database that logs calls. On the human side, we are making sure we are consistently professional so the customer knows what to expect, and we want to keep the customer informed.

Keeping the customer informed and aware of what is happening at the other end of the line is a top priority, Schwartz said.

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We guarantee a call-back within one business day, either to answer the question or report on the problem’s status, he said.