Are You Prepared for Tomorrow?: Developing and Offering Technology Repair Services

In order to align with the University's goal of providing best-in-class technology and information-based services, to meet the increased needs for our students, we have developed a repair shop which provides a cost-effective method for repairing students' computers, tablets, and smartphones. By our students' constant need for hardware/software repair and replacement, we were able to utilize the student technology fee in order to provide them with three repairs on personal laptops and desktops per semester free of charge. In addition, tablet and smartphone repairs are available for a flat fee of $50. By choosing the repair shop over local competitors, students have saved over $200,000 over the past 18 months. Due to promotion, successful repairs, and student feedback via social media, we noticed an increase in the demand of repairs over the past few years which has led us to improve our methods and increase efficiency internally. This paper intends to examine our repair shop from the beginning until now and inform other university-based help desks on the benefits of providing this service to their students.