Creating an integrated UVAFinance service model

Andrew Sallans

from Andrew Sallans, Finance Engagement Manager

Scott Adams (Director of Business Services) and I (Finance Engagement Manager) joined UVAFinance on March 30 with the goal of developing a future, integrated UVAFinance service model.

In our first few weeks, we've been holding information gathering calls with people throughout UVAFinance to understand the current state of services, experience with Salesforce as a tool for managing services, and goals for a future state. In the future, we will expand out to conversations with external stakeholders to capture more information about their needs.

Our Relationship with our Customers

From our conversations, we have a few common threads to share about current state:

• Customers often need to know exactly who or what unit does something in order to efficiently get a problem resolved.
• Each UVAFinance unit has its own approach to customer management and therefore its own customer relationship. Variability in how support requests come in, use of shared email boxes and lists, how support requests are managed, sharing of process/guidance documentation for self-help, and a mix of centralized and decentralized communications.
• It's difficult for leadership to see the status of customer engagement real-time or at scale. Requests for numbers on how many requests for X over a period of time broken out by Y can be a very laborious effort by multiple people, and may result in varied answers. Sometimes the question can't even be answered.
• Problems that cut across HR/Finance/ITS are a big pain point internally and for the customer.

A central challenge in our current state is a siloed approach to service. When the customer finds the right person to answer their question, this approach offers quality, personalized customer service that places the person first, with a strong human connection. When the customer doesn't know who can answer their question, it can be a very frustrating experience of being bounced around the organization. It is also difficult to maintain quality service as staff transition in and out and as service volume scales. From a customer's perspective, each service area of the organization appears to operate independently, and in many ways does.

When Workday Financials goes live in about 15 months, the customer will experience a shared HR and Finance storefront for most services. The customer should not need to know how the back office is organized in order to get their problem resolved. In order to make the transition to this new state, we need to move away from a siloed service mindset and embrace the concept of a "one company, one customer" relationship. 

We will seek ways to maintain a human connection in our approach while adding deeper connections between our services to provide the customer with a more connected experience across all the services we provide. With this, we aim to make it easier for our customers to get their problems solved accurately and quickly, and with less work on the backend. Our vision is to use Salesforce (a customer relationship management platform) as a way of relating engagement activities so that we can see all of our engagement with a given customer (or group of customers, such as an org, department, or school). As the Workday experience will span both HR and Finance, we are also currently working with HR partners to figure out how best to coordinate the customer experience with HR (they also use Salesforce).

Read the rest of this post (and share your thoughts or questions) in the Online Community!