New Financial Aid Call Center Unveiled

By Wil McLean
Special to FYI Online

Each month, more than 10,000 students call UMUC’s Adelphi, Maryland, headquarters with questions about financial aid. Until recently, the office has only been able to answer about 40 percent of those calls. Given UMUC’s commitment to timely attention to student inquiries, that presented a serious problem.

Enter the new Financial Aid Call Center, unveiled in fall 2002. Staffed by a supervisor and 10 customer service representatives, the center made an immediate and dramatic difference.

Dawn Mosisa

“From the beginning of September we took our ‘answer rate’ for incoming calls from 40 percent to consistently better than 95 percent,” said Dawn Mosisa, assistant vice president for Financial Aid. “That means our call abandonment rate has dropped to about three to four percent.”

Not only has the center improved the volume of calls that the Financial Aid office can handle, but it has also dramatically decreased the time students are kept on hold.

“The waiting time for a student in the telephone queue has dropped from around four or five minutes to less than one minute,” Mosisa said. “Again, this has remained consistent throughout November, December, and January.”

The call center’s impact doesn’t end there. The customer service representatives actually perform triage for the Financial Aid Office. Rather than simply acting as receptionists, the representatives are trained to answer student questions about the application process, status of financial aid applications, procedures for completing and submitting required documentation, and expectations based on the student’s current stage in the process, said Mosisa.

“We estimate that our call center is handling more than 75 percent of the incoming calls without having to forward them to an advisor,” Mosisa said. “The other 25 percent are forwarded to a financial aid advisor for eligibility and disbursement issues.”

Camaraderie is thriving among the representatives and friendly competitions have sprung up, as call stats from the previous day are posted.

“The morale in the Financial Aid Call Center is high, and the morale in the entire Financial Aid Office is at an all-time high because we’re so pleased (not to mention relieved) with the call center’s performance, and appreciative of the support it’s received from management,” said Mosisa.