Florida State University
FSU Streamlines Administrative Services Using Salesforce Service Cloud
Does your staff have trouble connecting to Wi-Fi while working from home? Do they have a payroll question? Do they need to better understand their benefits?
It wasn’t long ago that questions like these were challenging for Florida State University (FSU) employees to get answered. Faculty, staff and students would often call one department searching for help, only to get routed to another. On the backend, the issue was reported as closed based upon the user being forwarded to another department—even though the user’s issue was far from resolved.
FSU leaders knew they needed to improve this experience for their community; they wanted to create a consistent, seamless experience that enabled smooth hand-offs between departments.
The Chief Information Officer, Jane Livingston, who joined FSU in 2019, made improving service accountability and metrics as well as elevating the FSU community experience part of her first priorities. She envisioned one university-wide case management solution that spans all administrative departments to create a seamless, relevant, and timely experience.
Powering Institution-Wide Case Management
FSU selected Salesforce Service Cloud to unify their faculty and staff experience and streamline their service management delivery.
“Our community doesn’t differentiate among departments at FSU, they just want answers and solutions. And we, as staff, need the technologies to act like one FSU,” said Daniel Powell, Director, Community Engagement Technologies at FSU. “We needed to improve the ability of our staff to solve cases as well as a tool that is adaptable, scalable, easy to configure, and easy to use because we didn’t have a large budget or a large staff to support it.”
Using Salesforce, the FSU team created a modern, user-friendly experience that is configurable to the needs of their individual administrative departments, including student services, human resources, finance, and information technology.
The new experience also enabled a streamlined case management experience for the community. To get support or service, the FSU community would now log a single ticket versus having to reach out to different departments to get answers.
Powell attributes their success to not only their technical vision, approach, and skills, but also to the involvement of a cross-functional steering committee, change management leaders, and communications team.
The result was a modern, user-friendly experience that:
- Ensures FSU staff can deliver the desired seamless experience
- Helps the FSU community feel understood and valued
“Salesforce is great for us,” shares Powell. “Salesforce adapts to our processes, rather than the other way around, which is really important for adoption.”
Enhanced Experiences Lead to Inspired Ideas
FSU’s evolution with Salesforce has produced short and long term benefits.
The ease of use and off-the-shelf capabilities allowed departments to immediately implement the features to quickly improve their day-to-day flow. The Information Technology Services department, for example, was able to mature their service management by implementing a service catalog, incident management, change management, and knowledge on the Salesforce platform while also still accommodating for the unique needs of other departments.
But the long-term benefits are even more impactful. The collaboration and ideas generated from the collective university community have improved interdepartmental relations and strengthened the campus community.
According to Powell, adoption of Salesforce Service Cloud is growing as new departments continue to onboard. FSU also introduced Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud to enhance communications across the community, and there are many new student success projects in the near-term pipeline.