Shray Khanna

Working in IT for the Univeristy

I believe everyone should atleast once in their lifetime work in customer service in any way they can. This is the best way to develop and hone a plethora of skills as you get to deal with your clients directly and at time you may get feedback then and there.

I joined SFU's IT cell as a Service Desk Technician. The role required solving issues anyone related to the university would face. It can be any hardware problem to anything in software. We also solved tickets through a ticket management system called Service Now. As this role was in University my work required dealing with students from ages 16+ to professors and various vendors of ages 60+. It was a broad spectrum of things that we supported.

Dealing with clients of search diverse range you learn to be more empathetic, have better communication to convey your message in a more clear manner, collaborate with teams, deal with a lot of difficult clients, take risks or lead and learn to solve disputes. I believe these set of skills that I learned are hard to come by and cannot be learned through a textbook or even a degree!!

During this role, I wanted to apply my knowledge of Data Science to the incidents we solved in order to make the system more efficient. I was fortunate to have a manager agree on my idea. I made a predictive model that took raw text and gave an output with clear distinction of categories. I analyzed the categories of tickets everyone was solving and made reports which showed our response times and predictions on how we can assign with time to focus more.

This project was a success as my team was able to take on more requests efficiently and our incident resolution time also decreased.

This is the time I realised that taking risks and owning what you do by putting your heart and devotion would definitely lead to a fruitful result!!