Over the last 5 years, Cosaint has hosted a lot of security awareness training (SAT) portals for clients. And, in the process, we’ve learned a great deal about how to organize support (and quite a bit about how not to organize it!). So here are my 2 basic rules for successful SAT support.
#1 – Divide and Conquer
Clearly identify and differentiate between where your students should go to ask about:
- Problems with logging in to the system or registering for courses.
- Questions about your security policies, or about information security in general.
- How this training fits in with other training (typically, "I did my security training when I was hired 2 years ago").
In a large organization, this might well be split between 3 separate groups:
- Your IT department or LMS administrator.
- Your security officer/department.
- Your HR manager/department.
In a smaller organization, you won’t have that luxury. But you can also use "contact your supervisor" for policy and HR questions that your IT guru might struggle with.
Telling students about the different places to get help is in a welcome email is a good idea, but it’s not enough. You need to make the different contact points very obvious on your training portal and/or intranet.
#2 – Early Birds …
Whenever you launch a new training initiative or ask students to retake courses, you’re always going to get a sudden rush of people who can’t remember their username or password, keep mistyping their password, or are just annoyed that they’re being forced to do this and want to take it out on someone (surprisingly common). Even more amazing is the number of students who can’t see a prominently displayed "Having Problems, Click Here" link.
But the good news is that this is (usually) only a temporary phenomenon. And, as long as you’re aware that it’s going to happen, you can warn your support staff or even get them some additional help.
If you follow these two simple rules, you should be able to avoid some of the problems that we’ve experienced over the years.
