University of Massachusetts
A Focus on Faculty and Staff Success: Boosting Productivity and Efficiency
Just a few years ago, the University of Massachusetts System’s (UMass) administrative services were handled by numerous department-specific staff members. These services included human resources, finance, procurement, payroll, and information technology across its four undergraduate campuses, medical school, and law school. They relied purely on email and paper to get the job done, resulting in varying degrees of success.
Recognizing the need to optimize university-wide administrative services, leadership was eager to identify a solution that would help them achieve greater efficiencies, drive down operational costs, and boost employee satisfaction. They selected Salesforce as their solution to modernize the system’s administrative services, including a focus on improving the employee experience.
An Employee Success Solution
UMass System is a long-time Salesforce customer, utilizing Education Cloud to optimize the student experience and student success. Seeing this positive experience prompted UMass System’s Deputy Chief Enterprise Applications Officer, Doug Anderson, to formulate the idea of replicating this positive experience for its employees.
“We wanted to make it easier to get work done, and we were really inspired by the idea of a platform that could make collaboration between administrative divisions and departments possible,” said Anderson. Anderson and other UMass System leaders not only wanted to ensure departments were aligned in their operations, but they also wanted a platform that would scale across departments and encourage interdepartmental communication and teamwork.
Taking an Employee-Centric View
Implementing Service Cloud through an employee-centric lens was critical to the adoption of the platform across the UMass System’s administrative departments. Utilizing a set of design principles that would make rollout seamless, UMass kept its focus on reducing friction for the employee journey and simplifying the digital experience to prevent information overload.
This employee-focused perspective helped alleviate any discomfort of systemic change among departments. Through design-thinking, UMass System helped employees get trained on Salesforce while making adjustments as they witnessed the employee journey through the platform.
“Employees have great digital experiences in their everyday lives. While we are not Amazon, we want to bring these kinds of digital capabilities to their employee experience,” said Anderson. “Helping administrators envision these opportunities and reframe their thinking on traditional operations was an important element to our modernization plan.”
The UMass System continues its rapid expansion of Salesforce, recently completing the implementation of Service Cloud and Experience Cloud. They also plan to explore Salesforce’s AI, chatbots, and Robotic Process Automation to make routine campus transactions more efficient.