HRS service center will answer human-resource questions

When the Human Resource System (HRS) goes live, a newly reconfigured UW Service Center will provide all employees with a single point of initial contact for all HRS-related questions and concerns.

The administrative processes that the UW Service Center will support include payroll, benefits, time-keeping, leave and finance. In addition, the center will support the administration of human resource business processes. Personnel issues, however, will continue to be handled by deans’ and directors’ offices and campus HR offices.

The central campus HR offices are the Academic Personnel Office for faculty, academic staff and other unclassified staff, and the Classified Human Resources office for classified staff issues.

Once HRS goes live, employees with questions will have several different ways to interact with the staff of the service center. A designated e-mail address, as well as toll-free and local numbers for phone inquiries, will be available. In addition, a “click to chat” option will allow an employee to have questions answered in real time through an online chat session with service center staff, and a self-help Web form will be available via a link located in the My UW portal.

Lastly, the service center will support drop-in customers at the Office of Human Resources Support Center on the fifth floor of 21 N. Park St. Service center hours of operation will be from 7 a.m.-6 p.m., with walk-in support offered from 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

Initial call volume is expected to be high, with a projected volume of 70,000 customer inquiries within the first year of operation. Many of these calls will be from human-resource administrators who are looking for information and assistance regarding how to use the new HRS system; others will be from employees seeking assistance.

Service center staff will be working closely with staff from the Division of Information Technology to use DoIT’s popular and widely used Knowledge Base to host how-to documents supporting the most common human resource-related business practices.

The Knowledge Base will provide busy human-resource administrators with a searchable, easy-to-use tool for finding the most up to date and accurate information on how to use HRS, thus improving the overall quality and efficiency of HR business processes at UW–Madison.