How can Smart Lockers help IT support?

The Tech industry has been one of the big winners from lockdown-induced remote working. Yet for remote working employees, reliable IT has often been one of their greatest challenges. Without access to on-site IT support, or even just the advice of some of their techie peers in the office, some employees have struggled with the difficulties of video conferencing and fully remote decentralised work.

In the event of a hardware failure, both employees and their IT support departments have faced challenges in rapidly delivering the essential hardware they need to get up and working again quickly. This simple problem can damage productivity and morale through lost days of work, frustration, and increased pressure to get the job done.

However, there are now viable solutions to ease this pressure, reduce frustration and allow the IT team to provide improved remote IT support - Smart Lockers.

Using Smart Lockers as part of the IT support service means that IT teams can provide remote working employees with secure access to IT equipment in the event of an IT failure - reducing employee downtime and improving the overall experience of dealing with IT support.

Hardware can be ready for collection from a centrally located Smart Locker in as little as 60 seconds (a current real-world average of 45 mins), instead of a seemingly endless wait for a resolution that many employees may have experienced if they didn’t enjoy VIP status. This is a massive improvement in delivery-times, offering huge increases in efficiency for both employees and the business, representing an average reduction in time of over 90% (Statistical average of our customers - down from 10 hours to 45 mins). 

Making Smart Lockers effective

An often overlooked aspect of the Smart Locker revolution is that in order for Smart Lockers to work most effectively, and be fully adopted, they have to work transparently and seamlessly as part of your existing service management processes. Without the right approach to accessibility, and understanding, you could lack the required enthusiasm and buy-in from your end-users to make the system truly successful.

This is why Velocity Smart is built on ServiceNow - the world’s most widely used IT Service Management platform. Velocity are currently the only Smart Locker application to achieve the ServiceNow Build on Now level of certification - giving your end-users access to a system they already know and understand, and removing uptake obstacles and barriers to access.

‘Built on Now’ Certified

Adding an improved service to the Smart Locker solution, Velocity Smart Collect™ is now certified as part of the ServiceNow Built on Now program. This means that Velocity Smart Collect™ now allows ServiceNow customers to control Velocity Smart Lockers™ from their ServiceNow platform, bringing Click and Collect functionality to ServiceNow requests for the first time.

In practical terms, this means that when an employee needs to collect a new piece of equipment or device, such as a headset, battery or cable, they can simply place this request through the ServiceNow platform, receive a unique redemption code, and then ‘click and collect’ their required item from their chosen Velocity Smart Locker, which they will be directed to via the GPS enabled Velocity Smart CollectTM app. It’s a similar process to many of the transactions that many of us now undertake in our day-to-day lives - and is proving popular amongst businesses that have a large remote workforce. 

Importantly, a key feature of Velocity Smart Collect™ means that all items stocked into Velocity Smart Lockers can be disinfected according to your particular business policy, with a configurable feature requiring team members who are restocking to confirm that the items have been cleaned. This gives employees full confidence in the safety of the equipment, and provides a clear audit-trail.

To enforce this, all locker items - including restocked items, or that which is returned there by end-users, can now have a configurable ‘Quarantine period’ (set to default of 72 hours), to ensure that any Covid-19 virus is no longer present. All of these features can be integrated with ServiceNow applications - so that both employees and IT support staff can interact and manage familiar software that they already know how to operate. 

Convenience, efficiency, and security - a healthy combination for any business looking to upgrade their IT support with a Smart Locker system.