The situation
When a student gets locked out of their room, someone has to let them back in. At this university, that someone was a public safety officer or a service center agent, and the process behind them was spreadsheets, emails, and manual tracking. Loaner keys, at $30 apiece, went out with no reliable return process. Billing for repeat lockouts was reconciled by hand, weeks later, and there was no student notification process, so students learned about unreturned key charges and lockout charges only when they landed on their student accounts.
The opportunity existed because of groundwork laid over several years. The university had steadily extended ServiceNow beyond IT into case management for campus departments: the graduate school, finance and treasury, parking and transportation, card services, environmental health and safety, and dining services all run service delivery on the platform. Public safety and university services were already working in ServiceNow every day. What they needed was a purpose-built workflow connecting them.
What we did
We built the university’s first end-to-end campus operations solution of its kind on the platform:
- A student walk-up kiosk at the campus service center, and a 24x7 kiosk at public safety
- A mobile solution for public safety officers, so a lockout can be logged and resolved from an iPad in the field
- Agent workflows at the service center for loaner key checkout, returns, and escalations
- An API integration from ServiceNow to Atrium, the university’s student billing system, so lockout charges post in real time instead of through manual reconciliation
- An agent-managed billing calendar, so charges pause during semester start-up, summer camps, and reunions, when lockouts spike
- Delivered ServiceNow notifications telling students about key returns and pending charges
- A lockout dashboard giving university services and public safety a live view of volume, open cases, and outstanding loaner keys
The entire solution uses delivered ServiceNow functionality, no customizations. That was a deliberate constraint: the university upgrades the platform every year, and this workflow had to survive every upgrade without rework.
Results
- Around 10,000 lockouts processed in the first 18 months, handled by public safety officers in the field and the campus service center
- 418 lockouts in the first three weeks alone, with real-time student billing running from week one
- Manual billing reconciliation replaced by real-time posting to Atrium
- Spreadsheets, email threads, and manual tracking eliminated from the process
- More loaner keys returned, since students are now told when a key is due and what it costs if it is not
- Service center agents spend their time on students instead of manual administrative tracking
- Peak spring move-in period handled without falling back to the old process
- Zero customizations, keeping the university’s annual upgrade path clean
Why it matters
Most ServiceNow work stops at the help desk. This project put the platform in front of students at a kiosk, in the hands of public safety officers in the field, and inside the university’s billing flow. It’s what enterprise service management looks like when the foundation of shared case management is already in place: the next campus problem becomes a workflow, not a new system.