University of the Pacific Awards Unified Helpdesk Call Center Services RFP to OculusIT

University of the Pacific (Pacific or UOP) is a private Methodist-affiliated university with its main campus in Stockton, California, and graduate campuses in San Francisco and Sacramento. ’” ‘’California’s first university, the first independent, coeducational campus in California, and both the first conservatory of music and the first medical school on the West Coast.

To meet the customer support needs outside of regular business hours, UOP planned to leverage a managed service provider to field customer calls, with the intent to resolve the customer issue/request at first touch or assign/escalate accordingly to the appropriate support team(s) for follow up and resolution.

For this, UOP rolled out an RFP in June 2019 for a Managed Service Provider Call Center. The managed service provider model would augment our current support capabilities and offer 24 x 7 support to our customers.

Post rigorous evaluation via an RFP process, UOP awarded OculusIT due to OculusIT’s extensive experience with higher education institutions.

Scope of services include, but not limited to:

• Pilot a Call Center to respond to Sacramento and Stockton Helpdesk calls outside of regular business support hours, weekends, and holiday breaks. For example:
  • Monday through Friday, 05:00 pm PST to 08:00 am PST.
  • Saturday and Sunday, 24 x 7.
  • Holiday breaks.
• Students will be authenticated before the conversation being completed to comply with FERPA regulations. Pacific will provide single sign-on, read-only access to required pages in the Banner student information system (Tier 2 work).
• Call Center must be able to integrate with the University instance of ServiceNow. o Managed Service Provider to take ownership of ServiceNow integration.
• Call Center must assess Problems/Incidents/Requests and respond per established Service Level Agreements as defined in ServiceNow (SLA’s are currently based on Priority).
• Perform Tier 1 and some Tier 2 (as agreed upon) call center services for inbound calls to the departments. Tier 3 requests that require subject matter experts (SMEs) will be ticketed and escalated to the appropriate campus department.
• The call center will follow up with customers who have a ticket escalated within two (2) business days if the Tier II and II departments have not responded to the ticket confirming that the issue has been resolved. (Note: two business days are based on the hours of operation of the college department). A maximum of three outbound attempts to contact the person will be made and documented within the ticket.
• Development of an (internal) Knowledge Base housed within the ticketing environment.
• Regular meetings and quality checks by vendor’s account support staff with departments or assigned staff members.
• Monthly campus ticket reports (once a campus is live) to track call volume, identify call trends, and pinpoint areas for improvement.
• Monthly KPI report
• Call Center should have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place to minimize disruptions in service to the customer.
• Development of a Run Book (workflow processes) through knowledge transfer with SMEs.

OculusIT™ is a global, managed IT and cloud services company that, together with its technology partners, serves more than 600 colleges and universities. Headquartered in Chicago, OculusIT™ has a delivery network and operations across North America and globally. 

For further information, please visit www.oculusit.com