Campus News

University receives awards for excellence in customer service

parking staff excellence in CS 2008-h.group
Parking services staff who were part of the North Campus parking deck realignment project include (first row from left) Terry Helms; Franky Zhang; Chakir O’Neal; Sandra Chambers; Carolyn McGalliard; Blaine Van Note; Don Walters

UGA has received customer service awards from the Governor’s Office of Customer Service and the University System of Georgia Chancellor’s Customer Service Awards program.

Parking Services was honored for team excellence by Gov. Sonny Perdue on Oct. 8 and by Chancellor Errol B. Davis Jr. on Oct. 14 during the board of regents meeting. Additional honors from the chancellor went to Shawn Ellis of Enterprise Information Technology Services and to UGA as a whole.

Parking services was one of only 16 individuals or teams out of 636 nominations recognized by the governor for excellence in customer service. UGA was the only university to win a governor’s award. Parking services also received a gold medal in the team category from the chancellor for the re-engineering of the traffic flow in the North Campus parking deck.

Parking services’ strategic plan and the implementation of 114 of 154 goals earned an honorable mention for improvement initiatives from the chancellor.

Ellis, EITS director of client services, received an honorable mention in the category Outstanding Customer Service Leadership. Ellis instituted a “problem management” process to ascertain and address recurring network and technology problems, developed metrics for the EITS Help Desk, created a student laptop support program, re-aligned resources to provide more network support to students and combined the student and faculty/staff help desks to create a consistent, single point of contact for EITS customers.

These collective awards, coupled with the numerous service improvements already under way to foster a culture of customer service excellence, earned UGA a bronze award for Institution of the Year in the university system.

Several UGA employees were part of the University System of Georgia team who won the gold for Excellence of the Year award for GALILEO, the state’s virtual library. Team members from UGA included Brad Baxter, senior GALILEO programmer; Mike Thomas, GALILEO programmer; Phil Fitzpatrick, senior systems administrator; and Tim Peacock, department head and GALILEO technical coordinator.