Bethel Schools streamlines employee IT service with Zendesk

Bethel School District is the seventh-largest district in Washington state, serving 22,000 students and 1,500 teachers across 30 schools. The district’s IT team is made up of 39 agents and plays a critical role in ensuring that teachers and staff have seamless access to technology, allowing them to focus on delivering high-quality education.

The IT team supports school staff by managing enrollments, academic records, and system integrations. While they mainly assist teachers, about 20 percent of interactions are with students and parents, ensuring data remains accurate, accessible, and smoothly integrated.

Manual processes lead to inefficiency

As the district expanded, managing support for over 25,000 devices across schools became increasingly complex. Relying on SolarWinds, a system that lacked flexibility, made ticket management challenging and manual reporting calculations even harder.

In 2021, Bethel School District adopted Zendesk Suite to modernize IT support and provide teachers and students with a solution that was highly configurable, intuitive, and adaptive to meet the team’s evolving needs. This shift marked the beginning of the district’s automation journey, eliminating manual processes and bringing efficiency to workflows.

“We needed an automated employee service solution to solve issues before they even arise,” notes Christina Gries, Client Support Services Manager at Bethel School District. “Data is key to staying ahead of issues, instead of merely reacting to them.”

Automating routing for faster responses

Zendesk Suite helped the IT team eliminate bottlenecks by automating ticket routing and balancing workload distribution, instantly directing requests to the right agents based on issue type.

As a result, productivity surged—assignment to resolution time dropped by 50 percent to just 1.9 hours, first reply time improved by 71 percent, and requester wait time decreased by 77 percent.

Intelligent routing has completely transformed the team’s ability to respond quickly—especially during peak periods with urgent requests.

Real-time data = real-world actions

Lacking accurate insights and awareness, the IT team struggled to detect recurring issues, track resolution times, and optimize staffing. Without clear understanding, measuring impact or making data-driven decisions was nearly impossible.

Zendesk’s real-time reporting and analytics gave the team’s specialists full visibility to track tickets, detect patterns, and proactively improve service. These insights helped reduce missed calls by 72 percent, dropping from 18 percent to just 5 percent—ensuring staff were getting the support they needed, exactly when they needed it.

The team agrees wholeheartedly that analytics and reporting dashboards from Zendesk have transformed the IT support process for the district’s employees, Now, the team has interactive, data-driven insights at their fingertips for smarter decision-making.

Deeper visibility has allowed the IT support team to move from reacting to problems to preventing them altogether. A clear example was the annual surge of classroom disruptions—idle projectors over the summer led to technical issues at the start of each school year.

To address the problem, the team launched a proactive maintenance program, reducing projector-related inquiries by 80 percent and ensuring seamless learning.

“Analyzing data made it clear—we had to take action,” remarks Gries. “Before, tracking did not exist. Now, we love having everything centralized and measurable.”

Empowering autonomous employees

Bethel School District’s IT team also used to deal with an overloaded volume of repetitive tickets—users frequently submitted requests for simple issues like password resets, consuming valuable agent time and flooding the system with avoidable issues.

The team developed a self-service knowledge base, which was a significant improvement, empowering teachers and students to resolve many issues on their own. More than 200 articles now receive a collective 1,000 views each month, helping to reduce repetitive inquiries and allow agents to focus on more complex tickets.

IT support agents agree that the self-service help center was a major step forward and has been key to keeping running smoother than ever before.

Effortless collaboration, smarter support

Bethel School District’s IT team takes full advantage of Zendesk Marketplace, which offers over 1,900 apps to integrate and collaborate seamlessly with partners.

Through this ecosystem, the team incorporated key tools like Zoom to enhance troubleshooting, allowing technicians to initiate video sessions directly from a Zendesk ticket for real-time issue resolution and eliminating phone-based inefficiencies.

“There is a gap between how a technician and an end-user describe an issue,” shares Gries. “Being able to see exactly what the user sees eliminates confusion and enhances support effectiveness.”

By using Zoom alongside phone calls, the team resolves IT issues up to 50 percent faster—streamlining support and improving the experience for both staff and technicians.

Meanwhile, the Side Conversations feature within Zendesk means the IT team can easily chat with other teams that use Slack as a primary method of communication straight from the relevant ticket, enabling efficient team collaboration without switching platforms, and improving internal communication.

Advancing IT support with AI

Looking ahead, Bethel School District plans to further enhance employee service by expanding AI-powered automation. Through intelligent ticketing and call summaries, the team aims to elevate IT support to the next level.

“AI tools have proven incredibly valuable. As a team, we’d love the opportunity to jump in soon—bringing these capabilities in permanently would be a major turning point,” concludes Gries.