Customer Experience Support Lead

As a UW employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem-solving skills and dedication to build stronger minds and a healthier world.

UW faculty and staff also enjoy outstanding benefits, professional growth opportunities and unique resources in an environment noted for diversity, intellectual excitement, artistic pursuits and natural beauty.

The Office of Research Information Services (ORIS) has an outstanding opportunity for a Customer Experience Support Lead within our Customer Experience Support Team. ORIS accelerates research and advances innovation by delivering analysis, automation, and on-demand information through a seamless research administration experience that reduces the administrative burden to UW Researchers and Research Administrators and enables greater efficiencies in the application and processing of the thousands of award applications awarded annually to University researchers.

Under the general direction of the Customer Experience Manager, this position leads and trains Customer Experience Specialists in knowledgeable and efficient ticket management to ensure quick response and continuity of service for customers. The Customer Experience Support Lead owns the known issues process on the support desk for product/service releases and is responsible for preparing the support team for known issues in upcoming releases.

This position will develop expertise in multiple vendors and ORIS products and services to include MyResearch, the Research Website, and the SAGE Suite, and will utilize this expertise for leading the support incident response and writing documentation that increases customer efficiency and customer understanding of ORIS products and services. Through expert level customer support, the Customer Experience Support Lead reduces escalations to business analysts or product engineers, reducing development team effort and thereby helping to effect shorter product release timelines and enhancing researchers' ability to obtain and manage grants. The Customer Experience Support Lead is integral to continuous improvement on incident response recovery times, incident coordination with product/service teams, and monitoring analysis that leads to sustained uptimes for technology solutions that streamline and automate research administrative processes.

The role advocates for the UW research community by informing product/service managers on incident impacts and trends via targeted reporting, leading to quality products that focus on customers' needs and streamlining automated administrative processes for UW researchers.

The Office of Research supports a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Recognizing and valuing all our differences makes our office stronger and enhances our support for researchers; it will enrich the research carried out at the UW. Read more about DEIA in the Office of Research on our website: https://www.washington.edu/research/or/office-of-research-diversity-equity-and-inclusion.

The Customer Experience Support Lead role involves using analysis techniques and a foundational knowledge of service models and frameworks, such as ITSM, IT4IT, and/or ITIL, for incident response, prioritization, internal and external incident communication, resolution, and reporting. Technical scope requires the ability to quickly learn and support a complex software suite, from user access and permissions to understanding how to investigate, reproduce, and document complex software issues for both technical and non-technical audiences. The role is an expert user and troubleshooter of ORIS products and services, including the SAGE Suite, which is a multi-faceted software solution that integrates with multiple UW systems.

The Customer Experience Support Lead engages in several projects simultaneously requiring management of competing deadlines. This role exercises independent judgment while prioritizing activities such as: incident logging and prioritization, cause analysis, workaround identification, stakeholder communication, testing, resolution, technical documentation, reporting, and process improvement.

This position sits in a critical juncture as the central liaison to interpret and translate between researchers, research administrators, and users across all UW campuses, and the various software professionals on the ORIS products and services teams, as well as other Office of Research and UW partners such as GCA and UW-IT. The role applies independent judgment in communicating critical information in a fast-paced environment that requires discretion and diplomacy in working within the larger UW administrative environment.

Housed in the Office of Research Information Services, the position impacts research and research teams at all 280 University research centers and enables business continuity and greater efficiencies in the application and processing of the thousands of award applications processed and awarded annually to university researchers.

The position supports the mission of ORIS to accelerate research and advance innovation, and the University's mission of discovery, innovation and advancing knowledge through ensuring a seamless research administration experience, by providing a point of contact for researchers when they encounter serious issues in the administration of their awards. The work of the Customer Experience Support Lead is critical to minimizing disruption to the $1.9 billion-dollar research enterprise at the University of Washington. Decisions made by this position have a significant impact on the ability of the research community to complete critical grant related tasks. Without help in resolving their issues, the researcher and the University could be in jeopardy of losing research funding.

Responsibilities:

Support Lead

• Responsible for leading response and resolution of support tickets reported by multiple users or system wide outages. Duties include:

o Assess and prioritize incidents based on business impact, customer urgency, and service level agreements.

o In collaboration with Project/Service Managers, identify or assist product teams with root cause investigation and resolution. Test and validate incident resolutions.

o Communicate to impacted customers and support team internal stakeholders to provide updates on impact, incident progress, expected resolution time, and workaround solutions. Backup Communications Specialist for external stakeholder communications as needed.

o Iterate on incident processes to identify areas for process improvement.

• Responsible for guiding the day-to-day work of Customer Experience Specialists, including:

o Train Specialists on ORIS products, services, tools, and coach customer support best practices.

o Maintain a positive team environment by promoting respectful collaboration, encouraging feedback and recognition, and celebrating successes.

o Lead team standup meetings. Communicate emerging issues with expected customer impact and provide guidance on possible escalations.

Product and Services Support

• Responsible for providing Tier 1 and Tier 2 technical support for ORIS products and services. Including the following duties:

o First point of contact for internal escalations.

o Analyze, interpret, and translate information from non-technical customers on issues, requests and feedback regarding ORIS products and services to management and technical product teams.

o Apply system analysis techniques and procedures to monitor service system health. Contribute to designing, developing, and documenting health monitoring procedures.

• Responsible for collecting and analyzing incident data to identify trends, patterns, and recurring issues. Create reports and visualizations to aid in communicating identified trends and suggested process improvements to management. Provide general backup reporting for Customer Experience Manager, as directed.

Documentation

• Responsible for contributing to the ORIS effort to create documentation resulting in researchers who are efficient in managing pre-award and award management phases of the research lifecycle. Areas of responsibility include:

o Known issues documentation resulting from product or service updates and releases.

o Customer facing documentation such as user guides or public knowledge base articles.

o Technical team documentation designed to support Customer Experience Specialists.

o Continuous documentation improvement in collaboration with other technical support groups as well as cross-divisional teams of technologists, software engineers and system administrators

o Participate in documentation deployments and knowledge article audit cycles.

Other

• Maintain expert user knowledge in each electronic system ORIS develops, including understanding functionality, processes and interdependencies among systems and source databases.

• Perform other duties as required.

Experience Required:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Business Administration, Information Science, English, Communications, Digital Media, or related area.

• Minimum four years' experience providing direct customer support in an enterprise help desk or service desk environment to include:

o 2 years troubleshooting issues and performing root cause analysis on a technical team supporting software or software as a service.

o 2 years resolving Tier 2/3 requests and incidents.

o 1 year writing documentation for technical and non-technical audiences.

• Intermediate to advanced knowledge of enterprise-level Service Management and wiki tools such as ServiceNow and Atlassian Confluence.

• Demonstrated familiarity executing query languages such as SQL.

• Demonstrated intermediate to advanced knowledge of office productivity tools such as Office 365 and G-Suite or Google Collaborative applications.

• Demonstrated ability to work with minimal supervision both independently and in a collaborative team environment.

• Demonstrated experience working in a fast-paced environment; ability to manage varied workload under pressure and time constraints, including escalation when appropriate.

• Demonstrated excellent written/oral communication, personal interaction skills, and ability to communicate on technical subjects effectively with non-technical staff.

Experience Desired:

• ITIL Foundations V4 coursework or certification.

• Experience with data visualizations.

• Familiarity with HTML and CSS.

• Experience working with content management systems such as WordPress for creating or updating web page content.

• Familiarity with Atlassian JQL query language.

• Familiarity with the software development lifecycle.

• Knowledge of or experience with Lean, Agile and Kanban.

• Experience automating or improving recurring tasks, e.g. service management templates, using or writing PowerShell to query a database for system application information.

Working Environment:

This position contributes in a collaborative teamwork environment. Collaboration among the software developers, website team members, business analysts, project managers, editors, quality assurance, support and others is done in a shared space working environment through ad hoc meetings focused on problem-solving, and the use of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. Inflexible deadlines are common and non-standard working hours can be necessary. This position will primarily be expected to work standard working hours, aligned with Pacific Time zone where the office is based, and may require off-hours work for go-lives, incidents, and other deployments.

The Office of Research shares President Cauce's commitment to combat inequities and racism. The values of diversity, equity and inclusion are integral to the success of our research enterprise and are embedded in the culture of who we are as an institution and employer.

We will honor different and unique identities and nurture an accessible, welcoming and respectful environment for all staff, students and faculty in the Office of Research and for all members of the UW research community. We will regularly review our services and systems and adapt them to reflect the evolving environments and work styles of our employees and those we serve.

We are ALL responsible for confronting bias and inequities, both individual and institutional, that persist here and throughout our society. Our call is to remove barriers and promote access, opportunity, and justice for all. We all must commit to this ongoing work.

Recognizing and valuing diversity will make the Office of Research and the University stronger, and enrich the stellar research carried out at the UW.

Application Process:The application process may include completion of a variety of online assessments to obtain additional information that will be used in the evaluation process. These assessments may include Work Authorization, Cover Letter and/or others. Any assessments that you need to complete will appear on your screen as soon as you select "Apply to this position". Once you begin an assessment, it must be completed at that time; if you do not complete the assessment, you will be prompted to do so the next time you access your "My Jobs" page. If you select to take it later, it will appear on your "My Jobs" page to take when you are ready. Please note that your application will not be reviewed, and you will not be considered for this position until all required assessments have been completed.