ORCID is maturing out of our start-up phase. As we grow, we need to ensure the scalability of our operations; that’s why we decided to move to another help desk system that better supports our continued growth, and enables us to meet our community’s requirements and to optimize your experience.
In 2017, we handled 30,732 tickets from users and members. We’ve already exceeded that volume this year: we’ve answered over 31,000 tickets by the end of August 2018. We do our best to answer all tickets within two business days. As you can see from the chart below (for 2018 to date), we mostly succeed, thanks to the hard work of a small team of colleagues.
However, with our continued growth in membership (expected to reach over 1,000 shortly) and users (now well over 5.2 million), we need to make some changes in our support system to continue to provide you with the support you need.
For the past few months, I’ve been leading a project to research, evaluate, and implement a new support system, and I’m excited to say that we have completed the transition! I want to thank and recognize all the hard work of my ORCID colleagues, who helped to make this transition possible to create a better experience for you.
Our new system, which went live on September 14, has a number of benefits, including support for multiple languages (which we will be rolling out over the coming months), a better user interface, and improved reporting for making smarter decisions so that we can more easily do what is best for our community, so improving our users’ and members’ satisfaction.
The new system will also allow us to spread the responsibility for answering tickets across more staff, with all members of our newly formed global Engagement Team now responsible for tickets from their own members. Our dedicated User Support Specialist will continue to handle most user tickets, again with support from all Engagement Team members.
Unfortunately, one downside of the transition is that the new system is unable to support URL redirects, meaning that any links to our old Knowledge Base articles no longer work. Anyone using the old links will be taken to one of two pages — see the screenshot below. We have also created a spreadsheet mapping the old page links to the new ones, so that you can update your web pages accordingly.
We look forward to continuing to provide you with great service in the months and years to come!
