Fordham students may have noticed a new addition to the my.fordham.edu portal: a Tech Help tab. In April, Fordham IT launched a new Customer Care system with an accompanying tab on the portal to expedite and improve the technology help request process.

“The tab supports a brand new service for technology help and the new system provides much better tech support,” Elizabeth Cornell, Ph.D., director of IT Communications, said.

The new system, however, is set up as a pop-up window, rather than as a part of the portal itself.

Cornell explained that the system is set up in this manner because the tab links to another app separate from Banner and that the system is not a part of the my.fordham.edu portal itself.

She added that “having it [work] through the portal and automatically log you into the tech support system also helps keep the system secure and make sure that only people from Fordham are utilizing it.”

If students try to access the portal without disabling pop-up blockers, they will be met with a blank portal screen. In order to access the tab and the IT Customer Care app, students must disable pop-up blockers on their devices. Instructions are provided on Fordham IT News, with specific instructions for those who use Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Once pop-up blockers are disabled, clicking on the Tech Help tab on the portal will open the IT Customer Care App in another window.

On the IT Customer Care app, members of the Fordham community can make two different kinds of requests: incident requests and service requests. According to Fordham IT, incident requests “allow you to get help for problems with your computer, phone, applications, email, Internet access, printer or anything else you work with everyday.” Service requests are mainly for employees and are “for a new computer, phone, application, report, account or anything else you need to do your job. You may also request a change, such as the location of your computer, your phone and so on.”

The new system is being utilized by the Fordham community, according to Cornell, and “complaints are minimal.” She added that most students are saying that it is “easy to use.”

Students interviewed at the time of publication had not yet used the new system, with some saying that they didn’t know the new system existed.

“I feel like this is something they should send emails or something about,” Elizabeth Saballos, Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) ’17, said. “I never knew that you could do it online… I work in one of the offices on campus and we had a WiFi problem, but I didn’t know where to contact so I waited for an administrator to do something.”

There is “a bit of a learning curve,” Cornell said. “We rely on people to let us know what issues there are. We want to fix it and we want to make it as easy to use as possible.”

Cornell said that one of the advantages of the new system is that it provides students with the vocabulary and terms that they need to effectively request tech support, which expedites the process.

“The new system also allows you to categorize your service requests,” Cornell said. “In the past, when you would send an email to IT, you would describe the problem to the best of your ability and then someone at IT would send the email along to whoever [could] address it. Through the new system, you can categorize your request and it is sent directly to the person who can help you. So it cuts out one step in the process.”

The new IT Customer Care system was launched on April 4 and can be accessed via the portal.