Receiving tech help will soon be easier than ever with the improved IT Help Portal, going live at help.uark.edu on Saturday, March 31. Using feedback from the campus community, IT Services has re-designed the portal to simplify the user's experience.

"As the university continues to move toward a more collaborative campus, campus IT is stepping up to the plate so that students, faculty and staff have a useful, one-stop place to solve technological issues or contact us for support," Erin Griffin, content strategy specialist for IT Services, said.

The improved portal provides users with guidance to find solutions and get the tech help they need to get work done. New features include easier access to find setup instructions, create tickets, request services and find software. In addition, scheduled maintenance, ongoing outages and other alerts will be displayed on the portal home page to notify users when services will be impacted.

The portal re-design is not the only recent improvement to tech support on campus. Last year, the IT Help Desk was relocated from the Administrative Services Building (ADSB) to the heart of campus in the Arkansas Union. In this newly renovated space, users have a convenient place to stop by with questions related to any of our services. The IT Help Desk also provides after-hours assistance over the phone until 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday.

In February, the IT Help Desk was able to resolve 98 percent of issues on the first call, up from 92 percent in January. While this is impressive, the most significant figure is the 4.8 out of 5 customer satisfaction rating from the campus community.

"The positive changes happening in the Help Desk are a direct result of feedback from our campus community. We heard you and are working hard to align our services with users' needs," said Chuck Mitchell, director of support services for IT Services.

IT Service web developers worked closely with the IT Help Desk to implement user feedback when developing the new IT Help Portal. IT Service continues to value and use feedback from the campus community to move forward with improving IT Service's support and the user's experience.

Find out more about campus technology services and events at twitter.com/uaits and​ facebook.com/uarkits.