Paying for College Blog

What Do Your Student Borrowers Think?: SLA Student Satisfaction Survey Results

Thanks to Jeff Hopkins, SLA's Research Director, for his recent work on implementing the SLA Student Satisfaction survey at schools from coast to coast.  Thanks to the financial aid administrators for your support at ensuring the success of this program on your campus.  I believe that you found this feedback useful also.  Please contact Jeff at jhopkins@studentlendinganalytics.com if you are interested in learning more about this program, which requires remarkably little time on your part and is provided on a complimentary basis to the financial aid community. 

Here are some of the preliminary results from over 1,300 students surveyed to date:

Got a Student Loan Complaint? Who Ya Gonna Call? Om-buds-man

Apologies to those creative geniuses who brought us that hit movie Ghostbusters.  The Ombudsman  website states their purpose so succinctly:  "The Federal Student Aid Ombudsman of the Department of Education helps resolve disputes and solve other problems with federal student loans."

So, what disputes are they resolving?  Here is trend data for FY 2001-2006 on research cases that the Student Aid ombudsman has taken on (here is the presentation that this information was gleaned from:  Download Ombudsman_Presentation.ppt)

 

On the Topic of Customer Service: Making the Most of Customer Complaints

I found this to be an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal today about how good companies use customer complaints to go beyond the specific service failure to prevent the problem from cropping up again.  While this seems like common sense, it can be difficult to implement within organizations.  The article describes the need to provide an integrated solution which involves the customer, the manager and the front-line customer service employee.  Given the tensions that naturally arise among these three groups, it suggests five strategies for success:

• Create a "service logic" that explains how everything fits together.
• Draw attention to the successes of customer-service groups.
• Give customer service staff as much freedom as your business strategy allows.
• Collect as much data as you can and share it widely.
• Use meaningful measures of employee performance --rewards and demerits. 

Participate in SLA's Survey on Measuring Customer Service

Financial aid administrators (FAAs) often consider customer service in their lender selection process.  Through this survey, SLA hopes to gauge the importance of customer service as well as the innovative ways that it is being measured by schools. 

Participate in this survey by clicking on this link:   SLA Customer Service Measurement Survey.  Please respond by Friday, September 19th at 5pm PT.  Results will be available on Monday, September 22nd. All individual responses will be kept confidential as data will be provided in an aggregate fashion.   

Moving Beyond the Anecdotal: Measuring Lender Customer Service

There is clearly a consensus among financial aid administrators that customer service is a critical element in selecting lenders for their students.  In an environment of declining borrower benefits and sharp cutbacks in staffing at lender organizations, it has become even more important.  With HEOA requiring schools to provide additional clarity as to why EACH lender appears on a preferred lender list, I suspect more schools will implement an analytical approach to measuring customer service.  The secondary benefit of this analysis of customer service information is an improved feedback loop with lenders.

This post will seek to answer two fundamental questions:

Trends in Lender Call Centers

As we approach peak lending (and borrowing) season, SLA has been monitoring customer service call centers for top lenders.  Here are several of the insights we have gained this week:

• Two lenders, AES/PHEAA and Brazos, who recently indicated that they would be suspending their FFEL operations have made changes to their call centers

• AES/PHEAA has added the following message for borrowers calling into their 800 number:   "We're sorry, due to heavy call volume we're unable to answer your call at this time." Following this message our calls were dropped. 

• Brazos has shaved two hours off their call-center opening hours. They now operate between 7 a.m. - 5 p.m. CT rather than 7 a.m. - 7 p.m.