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WelcomeTritonlytics is a unit within the Office of Operational Strategic Initiatives at UC San Diego. Our mission is to inspire organizations to transform and improve their employee and customer experience through insights provided by state-of-the-art assessments, analytics, and AI that clearly inform actions, track progress, and drive best practices.
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Our Tritonlytics Community is comprised of 17 institutions (15 universities and two non-profit organizations) across the U.S. and growing.
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In this inaugural newsletter, you will hear from our Member Spotlight institution, CSU Office of the Chancellor, learn what's new with the Tritonlytics community, and understand why connecting with employees and customers is important now more than ever. We plan on sending a newsletter annually, for now, to keep you up to date with relevant information as you plan for the following survey year. We hope you enjoy the read.
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Meet the team from the California State University Office of the Chancellor (pictured from left to right):
Robyn L. Pennington, Ed.D., MBA, SPHR, GBA
Chief of Staff, Business and Finance
Alexis Naiknimbalkar, MBA, LSSBB
Director of Organizational Excellence, Business and Finance
Eric Andersson, LSSBB
Assistant Director of Organizational Excellence, Business and Finance
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Q. You joined the survey program back in 2015-16 (before we were even called Tritonlytics!). What were some factors that made you consider joining the survey program?
A. We were fortunate to have Steve Relyea as the new CSU Executive Vice Chancellor and CFO. He had a very positive experience using the Staff@Work and Customer Satisfaction Surveys at UCSD. Since 2015, the surveys have been integral parts of the Business & Finance division’s Balanced Scorecard, providing the senior leadership team with employee feedback on the internal health of the organization, as well as campus customer satisfaction feedback to help understand the quality of services we provide to our campuses and where there might be opportunities for improvement. Administering these surveys allows for both staff and customer voices to be heard.
Q. What were some obstacles you experienced when discussing survey results and trying to create a culture of trust?
A. Employee feedback is so important, and we want to ensure employees feel comfortable speaking openly and honestly about their opinions and concerns. The Tritonlytics staff has designed the Staff@Work survey to be anonymous, therefore each year, we go to great lengths to reassure employees that their feedback will not be identified. Additionally, the possibility of receiving negative feedback has been a concern for a few of our department managers. We have tried to reinforce the idea that the results are opportunities for us to improve and help us prioritize which areas to tackle. We want administrators to take action with the results and not ‘ding’ managers because their results may be lower than other areas.
Q. What were some of the successes?
A. Each year, the results from both surveys are used by senior leadership to create action plans for improvements, which are reviewed at an annual leadership summit for our division. After the first year, we received feedback from leaders that the results were surprising. Services that they thought would be rated lower actually received very favorable comments. And areas that were thought to be doing fine, received constructive feedback, which allowed us to create action plans to address those concerns. The results really help us prioritize our work. We have found that the customer satisfaction survey’s primary opportunities, along with the verbatim comments, provide leadership with the information they need to focus on areas to improve and increase customer satisfaction. And for the Staff@Work survey, we have seen a noticeable positive trend ever since we started using the survey in 2015/16:
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Q. What advice would you give to other Tritonlytics Community members who are entering their first or second year of the survey program? Or advice for those considering joining the survey program.
A. The best advice we can offer is to not be afraid of the results; every comment is an opportunity for improvement. In our first year, there was trepidation about what the results might show. But by the second year, our teams embraced the results as opportunities to enhance and improve. And as much as you can, be transparent with the results. Staff are often eager to know the outcomes of the surveys and they deserve to know the strengths as well as the opportunities for improvement that the survey show. And lastly, for the customer satisfaction survey, make sure to get an accurate and complete customer email list for the departments/services you are surveying. By doing this you can ensure that the results are meaningful and accurate.
Q. Any other best practices to share?
A. Posting information boards that include the survey results are a great way to be transparent. Here’s an example from our Financial Services group:
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Q. Just for fun - name one thing on your bucket list.
A. This is completely off topic, but our team likes to travel! The European Balloon Festival is one adventure that members of our team thought would be fun. It is the largest hot air balloon festival in Spain, and one of the largest in Europe. It takes place every year during the first fortnight of July in Igualada, Catalonia, Spain, a city located within 60 km from Barcelona. The added bonus is daydreaming about getting to travel internationally again!
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New Community MembersUW Information Technology launched their inaugural Customer Experience Survey in April. They received feedback from students, faculty, researchers, and staff on UW-IT services, communications, customer support/operations, and UW-IT overall. UC ANR will launch their first Customer Satisfaction Survey in the fall of 2021. They recently completed the second year of their ANR@Work survey and we are excited to have them join the CSS tribe!
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2021 NCCI Conference
In case you missed this year's virtual conference, you can view the presentation by Tritonlytics' very own Wayde Gilliam, Sr. Software Architect/ Engineer, and Angela Song, Sr. Director. "Using AI to theme 10,000 survey comments in less than 1 hour" demystifies artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and explores how findings can be made meaningful and actionable.
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New Stuff
Based on feedback from the 2020 Tritonlytics Customer Satisfaction Survey, the following features have been added to the surveys and analytics.
- Promapp for project timeline and survey design
- Pre-selected departments/service areas
- Tooltip for department/service area description
- Automated thank you/confirmation email upon survey completion
- AI to identify potential themes for text documentation
- Description of "understands my requirements" and "moving in a positive direction"
- Automated daily or weekly response reports by department/service area
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In addition, best practices have been added to the Tritonlytics website with resources for community members such as ways to share survey results, how to communicate its impact and benefits, and action planning tools to inspire your organization to transform and improve your employee and customer experience.
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Why Employee and Customer Surveys are Crucial Now More Than EverCOVID-19 disrupted all of our lives, both personally and professionally. Staying connected with your employees and customers is important and surveys provide an opportunity to let your campus community know you care about their welfare and to also understand the impact of COVID-19 on students, faculty, staff, and their work. It's a time of stress in work being done differently than we ever anticipated and it is tempting to forgo anything that seems like a luxury, such as surveys. However, surveys have never been intended to be “nice to know” information - they are intended to collect important information that departments need to know to confidently say they are doing the most mission-critical work that is aligned with what their customers need.
Now, more than ever with budgetary constraints, it is essential that we can demonstrate that we are laser-focused with our time and efforts on customer and stakeholder-defined value add activities. In times of uncertainty, you need concrete data so that you know you are not wasting precious time and resources on things that are missing the mark. This year, use surveys to:
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Explicitly ask your customers how you can serve them differently.
Ensure you still meet their needs in this new work environment (for those working remotely). Maybe you will need to shift some business hours for your units to accommodate different patterns of work hours now. You may learn that someone answering the phone or responding to email is crucial. Or that people prefer that you respond to problems via zoom or collaborative problem-solving brainstorming sessions.
Get your employee's feedback on how your organization is managing the communications about the impact of COVID-19. Has there been active communication about how work will continue during and beyond the current crisis?
Find out if employees have the tools necessary to perform their job duties regardless of where they are working.
Understand how to support connection, communication, productivity, and well-being. Do employees feel like your organization cares about their well-being? Have supervisors been supportive of personal issues that arise?
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Work, workers, and the workplace of the future have all been impacted and it's crucial to find out how you can best pivot or augment your virtual toolkit to work in support of your customers and employees - but you won’t know if you don’t ask!
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