The University of California Berkeley delivers exceptional student service with Salesforce

When students have questions about financial aid, where should they go? Which office do they need to visit? If there’s a question about registration, who should they talk to? Why isn’t there a “one-stop shop” for students to ask questions, get help, and find all of the answers they need?

These are the questions the University of California Berkeley wanted to answer after listening to student feedback.

Providing a consistent student service experience at a school with over 36,000 students can be quite the challenge. Making that experience consistently positive can prove even more difficult. After asking students about their view on what student services should look like, UC Berkeley needed to transform the way it interacted with and serviced student requests for help in the areas of financial aid, billing, and registration.

The result: Cal Student Central. A center of excellence where students can get the help they need and find answers to questions both online and in a single physical office.

Using the Salesforce Service Cloud, UC Berkeley took advantage of the case management tool – which would become the backbone of Cal Student Central. “We love [Salesforce] because it’s cumulative. We can see the history of the transaction or interaction – whether it’s for a particular question or a series of questions,” said Dr. Anne De Luca, Associate Vice Chancellor of Admissions and Enrollment.

The analytic data provided by the Service Cloud was also a key factor in making Cal Student Central a success. UC Berkeley was able to track how long the average case took to resolve, and consequently use this data to make a business case for much-needed additional staffing. They were also able to tag each case and clearly distinguish which questions were most common across the entire campus and all partner offices. They could then tailor email, website, and social communication to students based on these trending topics throughout the year — all of this in an effort to share the right information at the right time and provide the most efficient, consistent and positive service.

As Cal Student Central was created out of student feedback, continuing to monitor student reactions to the new tool has been very important. “The students love that they don’t have to re-tell their story every time, which is very frustrating and easy for us to expect from students in a very large and distributed institution like Berkeley” said De Luca. “We know them and are getting to know them better each time they interact with us.”