VT has struggled with how to staff a 24/7 365 Information Center while providing a reasonable inclement weather policy to keep our Information center staff safe. Last year we were inspired by a presentation by VCU “Expanding Our Call Center Services To Places Far and Wide” on how they mobilized their Telecommunications group to deploy remotely during the UCI Bike race. This talk will be about how we took what we learned from VCU and applied to creating our own “Emergency Preparedness Laptop” pilot program for mobilizing out Information Center during inclement weather or other emergencies that we might encounter. In this talk we will discuss the technical challenges we had in preparing the laptops for deployment as well and the training and customer service challenges we met along the way. Finally, what did we learn from our pilot and how do we plan to improve the program.
