The Service Desk has developed its service to respond to the challenges of supporting remote learning, teaching and research during the Covid-19 crisis. Although we've been unable to offer our walk-in and phone services, we've been working hard to make sure you can still contact us with your IT queries.
The myit.abdn.ac.uk self-service portal
Our self-service portal at https://myit.abdn.ac.uk is your first point of contact with the Service Desk. Here you can report an issue, request new services, browse solutions to known queries, view and update your existing Service Desk tickets, and use our new live Chat service – see below.
Chat with us in real time!
We have introduced a live Chat service to our self-service portal at myit.abdn.ac.uk.
While you can still email us, we would encourage you to chat with us first. Chat removes the time-consuming to-and-fro of email interaction, often allowing us to resolve your query during the chat – current resolution times average less than 15 mins from start to finish.
And if we can’t resolve your query, we will raise a ticket based on what was discussed and pass your query to colleagues for further investigation.
Meet the chat bots
Underpinning this service are automated chat bots. When asked questions, chat bots search our database of FAQs for appropriate responses. They then either guide you to an existing solution, or gather information about your query so that when a member of our team picks it up, they have all the information they need to help you.
The bots are already helping staff and students successfully resolve account or password related queries – all without human interaction. For example, a bot can help a new student check that their account ID and password are correct, show them where and how to log in, getting them up and running at any time of day or night.
Working Hours
We will expand our regular working hours for the start of term and beyond - starting at 08:00 and ending at 18:00. This will help with those queries that pop-up outside of the 9-5, recognising that many of our students are studying in different time zones and that many of our home-based staff are now operating more flexible working days. Outside of business hours, when our staff are not online to chat to you in real-time, the bots will try to resolve your queries. Or you can type your query into the chat, and we will pick it up the next working day.
What about the walk-in Desks in the Libraries?
We closed the walk-in Service Desks in SDRL and Polwarth in March, when we all switched to working from home. However, from 21 September, we will have desktop PCs in ‘kiosk’ mode within SDRL and Polwarth (and temporarily in Elphinstone Hall during the first 3 weeks of term). These will display the myit.abdn.ac.uk portal and allow staff and students to use our chat service.
We are planning additional kiosk sites, aiming to widen the reach of the IT Service Desk to people across the campus. We welcome your suggestions for kiosk locations where staff and students may (safely!) be congregating.
Author: Service Desk Team, DDIS