Service
2013 marked the beginning of ASU’s Service Excellence Initiatives. Through assessments, we learned student service needs and wants were focused on quality of service and delivery, personalized communication standards improving relevancy and timeliness, and greater access to online resources. We researched tools and systems that could elevate these improvements at the enterprise level and decided to move forward with Salesforce.
There are two components that makeup the Salesforce Service Cloud: knowledge and case management. These are not new concepts at ASU, but rather improved technology.
In the past, students searched websites for information. That information varied, was inconsistent and spread out, and didn’t cover much of the services offered across ASU.
We have now built a robust Knowledge Base of articles that are relevant, helpful, searchable and accessible by students. The Knowledge Base is easy to search and access through My ASU. Self-service is a great starting point based on student requests for more online resources and technology to support student service.
The second component is case management, which enhances our relationships with students. Our case management implementation strategy was to bring general, public email addresses into Salesforce first, bringing visibility into the amount, type and quality of service being provided. This enabled us to set university-wide goals for response time, resolution time and expectations for service quality.
In theory, we already handle cases, but in a manner that is inefficient and unfriendly to students. The bigger the university, the more complicated the processes — and students are spending more time and getting more frustrated trying to conduct business at ASU.
Salesforce Case Management:
- Centralizes information on current and past requests for service
- Creates cases and tracks how our resources are being used
- Receives, tracks and responds to emails sent to ASU email accounts within Salesforce
- Allows automated routing via workflow rules so that the sharing of information is done behind the scenes as opposed to having students walk or call from office to office, person to person
- Improves collaboration, allows staff to easily interact with others across departments, consolidates the back-and-forth email trail, escalates issues, assigns issues to the right person and improves outcomes
With the Salesforce Service Cloud, ASU is able to provide resolutions to students in a manner that is faster and better.