The ITS Service Desk now takes appointments at the SASB North location.
On October 21, the Service Desk launched a pilot program to accept appointments at SASB North for students, faculty, staff, retirees and anyone else associated with UNC-Chapel Hill who needs tech support.
The SASB North location offers all the same services as the Service Desk’s Undergraduate Library location. Now with the ability to book appointments, campus members can plan their service needs around their own schedule.
Students, faculty and staff have commonly requested the ability to book appointments, said Erin Towne, ITS Tier 1 Walk-In Supervisor.
ITS is able to offer Service Desk appointments at SASB North because ITS now has the right tool — and a tool that required zero investment to implement. When UNC-Chapel Hill migrated to Office 365, among the suite of tools was Microsoft Booking, a web and mobile app that enables customers to quickly book appointments and proactively provide information about their service needs.
Service uses Microsoft Bookings
After conceiving the idea of offering appointments at SASB North, ITS made this available by setting up the system in Microsoft Bookings, adding the link for appointments to the help.unc.edu site, and then communicating with other departments on campus to make them aware of the offering.
“The actual setup of Microsoft Bookings is quick and easy,” Towne said. “The larger effort was on the administrative end — making sure that we had sufficient staffing to provide prompt service to appointments.”
ITS is piloting the use of Service Desk appointments at the SASB location with the hope that it will provide increased visibility for SASB and create some additional traffic to that location.
Strong demand expected
ITS anticipates strong demand for this service. The Service Desk has been consistently booking appointments since rolling out the offering. So far, feedback has been positive, especially from the dental school, which is on the same side of campus as SASB.
ITS staffers key to bringing this pilot program to fruition were Erin Towne, Shaun Fuller, Patrick Kiernan and Savannah Dunn. Kiernan and Dunn set up and tested Microsoft Bookings and now facilitate the appointments.
ITS plans to expand its use of Microsoft Bookings. ITS will use Microsoft Bookings to book appointments for the 2-Step Verification deployment currently in progress with faculty, staff and retirees. Also, if the SASB North pilot goes well, ITS can implement appointment booking at the Undergraduate Library location too, Towne said.
Campus members can find the Service Desk appointments booking link at http://help.unc.edu > Walk-In Support > Book Appointment. They also can use the direct link of http://bit.ly/SASBNorth to reach the appointment service.