Sautter graphic for article

IET initiative to improve the customer experience wins top UC award

  • by Ahna Heller

“UC Davis builds a Service Hub that offers the Total Experience” - a project to improve customer experience - has won a Golden award from the University of California's Larry L. Sautter award program.

The award received by IET’s Client Success unit on Aug. 10 at the UC Tech conference hosted by UCLA is one of 10 top information-technology prizes given by the UC for 2021. The Larry L. Sautter award program recognizes IT innovations that advance teaching, research, public service and patient care, or that improve the effectiveness of university processes.

IET's submission details how the Client Success team upgraded the already well-established Service Hub that offers a suite of IT service and support for campus. As the project’s award application explained, ”It’s not enough to use a best -in-class application like ServiceNow for service delivery. The team’s laser focus is on the customer experience and they were guided by this when they set out to create a next generation Service Hub with Total Experience in mind.”

The Service Hub underwent three significant upgrades in 2020/21, focused on improving the service experience:

  1. Automating and improving efficiencies with regard to campus-licensed software delivery.
  2. Migrating and integrating the service catalog in Drupal into the Service Hub’s ServiceNow platform.
  3. Adding a virtual agent to further promote self-service, improve the user experience, and free up time for help desk analysts.

“Every year a percentage of our population is new to campus and will not be aware of legacy websites or processes,” said Anita Nichols, director of Client Success and project lead. “Our team is passionate about bringing information to where our customer is and removing these barriers. "

“We are honored to receive the 2021 Larry L. Sautter Golden Award,” said CIO, Viji Murali. "I am so pleased that the incredible work of the Client Success team has been recognized by the UC IT Leadership Council."

UC Davis Health is also the recipient of a Sautter Golden award for their UC Health cBioPortal. According to the project submission, “… UC Davis Health adapted and implemented a research and clinical focused tool developed by Memorial Sloan Kettering to provide an interactive exploration view of UC curated cancer genomics data sets. This builds towards further partnership with oncologists and researchers across the UC, and targets future support by the health system and extension of this tool through a focus on reusability and extensibility.”

Visit this UCOP webpage to see the full list of 2021 awardees.