From Melody's Desk: March 10, 2022

Dear Colleagues,

Shout out to Joey Carls and the Engagement Team on the launch of Askfinance@virginia.edu (read more about that on the blog). I can’t tell you how excited I am to adopt the Salesforce platform for our user engagement. 

I know that I have become quite adept at figuring out when I make a call to a customer service line – for a store, a bank, or another service – whether or not they have a robust customer relations management (CRM) tool. Do they know when I called earlier? Do they know what advice they have given me previously? Do they know the correct next step to suggest to me to solve my problem without giving me a run-around or sending me back to a step that I’ve already done? This platform will allow UVAFinance to provide best-in-class support.

In 2017 we began a journey to create the UVAFinance organization. Prior to that time, we were a disparate group of independent departments, with different approaches to how we did work, how we delivered customer service, goals and objectives, admin and IT support, and technology/tools.

In that all-hands effort, we established a vision that has propelled us forward through the FST project: to be the valued and trusted financial partner to our stakeholders. We developed a set of 5 values, that were updated and re-affirmed in 2020:

We knew at that point that we all wanted to provide the best support to our stakeholders, but we were not yet equipped to do so. We have a confusing maze of websites, email addresses, and phone numbers which makes it very tough for faculty or staff with a question to figure out how to get one, consistent, and accurate answer. It was even difficult for someone in the field to know whether to contact budget, accounting, or payroll for an answer to their question.

We have slowly been working through the FST project to transform our financial management capabilities... to create a strong foundation of financial expertise, processes, and systems, dedicated to advancing the University’s academic mission through its strategic plan. We will finally have the tools and systems to deliver exceptional services and systems to help faculty, staff, and students do their best work.

One important step we can take right now, as we prepare for the launch and stabilization process around Workday Finance is to begin to adopt a common set of tools to support stakeholder engagement. AskFinance@virginia.edu and Salesforce will allow us finally to utilize a common platform for collecting and responding to all types of inquiries. Using this consistent interface will allow us to provide timely and consistent feedback… and will provide us data to inform where we should apply continuous improvement to our policies, procedures, websites, and other materials.

This is but one example where consistent tools will help us be the best we can be. Aligning around Office 365 (including Teams); Workday Reporting and UBI for reporting and analytics; maintaining current policies and procedures and updating the UVAFinance website are all additional efforts that we will focus on.

With the launch of Workday Finance coming quickly, we’ve been focusing on change behavior. For UVAFinance leaders and managers, the enthusiastic adoption of Salesforce and modeling this to your teams is one critical way that we can hasten the provision of excellent service to our stakeholders.

Thanks!