Salesforce Success Stories: Student Financial Services

Three months into their journey with Salesforce, Student Financial Services staff are pleased with the way the tool empowers them to better serve students.  

Jenn Bari, who manages the SFS Contact Center, says SFS leaders had been using a homegrown system to track student email cases for many years.  The system worked, but the team needed something that could better connect communication between students and families, and also that could give the team better reporting so they could make data-driven decisions regarding staffing and services, instead of gut instincts. 

"We wanted a system that had all the information in one place," says Bari. 

"We were having to look in five different places for previous conversations and it was hard to get context on what had already been discussed with students.  From a continuous improvement mindset, we knew we needed something that served us better."

Frustrated with their homegrown system's limitations, Bari had asked for alternative recommendations from UVA's Cornerstone Program during one cohort year.  After researching the problem, the Cornerstone team recommended Salesforce as the best solution for SFS.  At that time, the department wasn't able to make the change.  

Fast forward to a few years later, UVAFinance made the decision to adopt Salesforce and suddenly the option was on the table. 

"When Steve Kimata surprised me one week with a meeting about Salesforce, I asked 'does this mean my dream is coming true?'" laughs Bari.  

Scott Adams, Jack Jensen, Meredith Dixon, and Andrew Sallans of UVAFinance's Finance Engagement team got to work with the SFS team, piggybacking on what they'd already done implementing Salesforce with several other departments within Finance.  It took the group two months of intense work and collaboration to hammer out the details and get the new system set up.   

Now, after three months of using Salesforce, Bari and her colleagues can confirm Salesforce is, in fact, the fulfillment of their continuous improvement wish.

"Having our ticketing system and all the associated emails in one place is pretty significant," says Financial Aid Application Analyst John Martin.  

"Salesforce keeps everything visible to us."

Bari agrees, adding that the whole team can more easily communicate with one another and with students and families because of that visibility.  She notes that Salesforce has been especially useful for frontline staff, who, when students contact them, can see everything that has transpired before with the student's case, easily giving them updates and demonstrating coordinated services. 

So are SFS's stakeholders noticing the same positive impact the SFS staff is?  Martin says based on anecdotal evidence so far, the answer is yes, and Bari says that the three months of data they've collected so far will soon illustrate the answer to that question more clearly.  She's excited to report out on the data and tease out the trends. 

One thing they can say for sure so far is that Salesforce has enabled them to quantify their workload in a way they hadn't been able to before.  Bari notes that in their first three months with Salesforce, SFS logged over 10 thousand cases. 

"And that's ten thousand cases that were not manually tracked on a spreadsheet," Martin qualifies. 

Bari says the next steps for SFS beyond their data reporting will be to integrate their phone system into Salesforce for an even more complete, transparent picture of their customer service.