The business case for DU to adopt a campus wide customer service system to reduce costs and increase customer happiness.

1. Proposal to Reduce Customer
Service Costs at the University
of Denver
Mike Rivera
DU: University Communications
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver

2. Executive Summary
e University of Denver (DU) serves a large number of constituents on a daily basis. Many are in need of
customer service to answer questions about the school, its programs, cost of attendance or any number of
other topics. Typically, these interactions occur in relative isolation from each other because the university
is operated in a decentralized manner where each unit has signi cant autonomy from all others. is
operational structure fosters an inefficient method of handling customer service issues. Duplication of
efforts, information bottlenecks and longer than necessary wait times are common and costly.
is analysis centers around estimates from one of the primary customer service oriented divisions,
Enrollment. Some of the ndings include:
• Customer service needs are triaged, researched and responded to by a total of 91 staff members.
• $376,524/year (excluding any associated bene t costs) is spent to staff customer service efforts.
• A lack of precise data exists about the types of issues constituents face, how many incoming issues are
received and the ability to track issues from beginning to end making analysis and progress difficult.
To reduce the number of dedicated man-hours and cost while increasing our data pool and customer
service experience, DU can implement a university wide, online customer service tool called Get
Satisfaction. While the tool will not eliminate all customer service issues, it can reduce many of them and
do so at a cost savings compared to the current approach (again, estimates apply to Enrollment):
• A 10% reduction in the amount of duplicated effort on the part of staff members efforts
• A 32% reduction in volume of incoming requests as people help one another (no DU intervention).
• A net savings of $25,000 for the rst year of use, $116,000 for the second. Subsequent years would see
the same or better results.
• Calculations could be extrapolated to the rest of DU’s organization for even greater efficiencies.
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
1

3. Current State of Customer Service at DU
e University of Denver enrolls 12,000 students, employs 3,000 professionals, has 110,000 living alumni
and sees over 9,000 interested new student applicants each year. (University Communications, 2011) e
school website attracts 4 million people a year who view nearly 40 million pages in total. (University of
Denver, 2011) With so many people interacting online with the university at any given time, it’s important
to have resources available to answer questions, provide guidance and troubleshoot issues when they
occur. DU does this through a decentralized approach where each academic and administrative unit
dedicates people to handle customer service requests within and for their unit. However, online visitors are
not always knowledgeable about this decentralized structure and where or who they should send their
requests. For example, DU’s website offers a “contact us” form that acts as a central place where anyone can
get help. Messages from this source are triaged by University Communications department personnel who
forward each inquiry to the most appropriate person or department on campus based on the speci c
circumstances of each request. Other times, people will opt out of the general “contact us” channel in favor
of contacting a speci c department or person if they’re con dent that their choice is the best one. DU’s
Admission department is representative of this method of interaction. e department is continuously
contacted by prospective students who have speci c issues to sort out. Financial Aid and academic
advisors within academic departments are similarly contacted about speci c issues relating to their areas
of focus.
Even though the triage process creates extra work for DU staff, it works well for visitors who don’t know
or care to research who best to send their speci c concerns. However, the system does have limitations and
downsides. It relies on DU staff to handle all issues internally at a signi cant cost to the university. A better
system could be employed, but anything new won’t completely eliminate all downsides or costs. Indeed,
many incoming messages will always need to be handled by internal staff because of the highly customized
or sensitive nature of a each request. Many others, though, could be bene tted with a different approach.
Let’s look at how customer service inquiries are handled today within a single campus division—
enrollment—and speci cally the undergraduate admission and nancial aid groups. First, customer
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
2

4. service requests are received via the web, email, social media channels, phone or in person. Each request is
triaged, researched, responded to and then re-responded to as need be until the issue is resolved.
According to Emily Forbes, Director of Communications—Enrollment Division, these two groups
respond to anywhere from 6,500-8,500 inquiries per month. It’s important to note that although this
proposal discusses a web based solution, we need to be aware that customer service also happens offline
whether over the phone or in person. However, this proposal is not limited to having impact on a web-
only basis. Companies who are already following a customer service approach over social media where
inquiries are answered by non-staff users (crowdsourced) are already witness to a reduction in all forms of
communication, not just online. (Customer Portfolio Management, 2011)
e characteristic to keep in mind in all of this back and forth is that it isn’t systematically saved for
future bene t. If two people have the same or similar questions, they are asked independently from each
other and are, in turn, processed independently as well. ose two questions are likely never to cross paths
as they get answered. is environment of duplication of efforts (and therefore cost) is incurred by the
university without its knowledge of occurring since it’s not tracked or measured. And if it does happen to
know that similar requests are being independently answered two, three or more times, it is currently
powerless to do anything about it. Staff may create a list of ready-made responses to simplify and shorten
response times, but those efficiencies do not eliminate the cost of the effort completely.
e following chart summarizes the estimated costs associated with customer service within the
undergraduate admission and nancial aid groups. (Emily Forbes, personal communication, February 25,
2011)
Enrollment Division’s Current Customer Service Costs
(Dollar amounts exclude benefit costs for employees who qualify)
Position Title # of People Monthly Hours Hourly Wage Total Cost
Enrollment Specialists 5 43 $15 $3,225
Visit Coordinators 2 87 $15 $2,610
Admission Counselors 13 43 $19 $10,621
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
3

5. Position Title # of People Monthly Hours Hourly Wage Total Cost
Student Representatives 60 12 $8 $5,760
Work Studies 2 173 $11 $3,806
Financial Aid Advisors 9 35 $17 $5,355
Monthly Subtotal $31,377
Yearly Grand Total $376,524
As evidenced from the chart, many people have customer service oriented duties as part of their
employment with the university’s enrollment division. In aggregate, their time and effort costs DU
$376,524 a year. If we take the total dollar amount and divide it by the range of emails received per year
(78,000-102,000) we learn that DU spends somewhere between $3.69-4.83 per email to resolve customer
service inquiries. Whether this number looks big or small to you, it only includes two groups within DU
(albeit two groups that have signi cant customer service responsibilities and signi cantly more staff
dedicated to the effort than other campus groups). Nonetheless, this number doesn’t re ect any of the
customer service costs borne by the rest of the university (nor the bene t costs incurred by staff as already
mentioned in the chart). But for this analysis, we need only look at these costs to see how a new system
would reduce costs and bene t both DU as well as DU’s external audiences.
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
4

6. A New Solution
Get Satisfaction (getsatisfaction.com)
is a web-based customer service
application that offers many bene ts
and the promise of lower overall
costs. e major features of Get
Satisfaction’s tool includes:
• Feedback options: people can ask a
question, share an idea, report a
problem or give praise all in the
same place and using the same
interface.
• Storage: all information entered
into the system is stored into a
knowledge base where the most
popular topics are automatically
aggregated into an FAQ.
• Accessible: the system can be integrated into the DU
website in a variety of ways. It can also be integrated
into Facebook and accessed via mobile devices.
• Analytics: the system comes with an analytics
package in order to mined for useful data that can
inform future decisions.
• Extensible: the system can be integrated with
ZenDesk, a support ticket system, and CRM tools.
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
5

7. • Customizable: the system can be altered to mimic the current DU brand and given a unique URL based
on our own du.edu address.
• Moderation: topics can be moderated so that offensive material can be removed.
• Hosted: the system is run by a third party so DU is not responsible for security, servers and other
concerns. e company also offers a service level agreement for peace of mind.
• Exportable: all data can be exported if the need arises in the future.
Cost/Benefit Analysis
Ideally, a new customer service approach would simultaneously decrease costs and increase customer
satisfaction. Get Satisfaction can make these ideals real. ree main trends drive this possibility.
First, the sheer amount of inquiries DU receives (6,500-8,500 per month for one division). As shown in
the chart above, 91 people are fully or partially tasked to handle the volume. And, arguably, the high
number of requests are an indication that answers to questions are not available or are difficult to nd.
Inquiries can be analyzed with the help of Get Satisfaction’s analytics package to spot trends and patterns
that can help inform the university about what issues are most pressing and how answers to common
questions might best be communicated in order to further decrease the number of incoming requests.
Second, society is increasingly willing to engage in online “self help.” e Pew Internet & American Life
Project has studied the impact of the internet on American society since 1999. Among their 2010 ndings
on adults: (Pew Research Center, 2010)
• 79% used the Internet
• 78% conducted online research about a product or service they considered buying
• 61% used a social networking site like Facebook and LinkedIn
• 59% look for "how-to," "do-it-yourself " or repair information (2008 data)
• 32% posted a comment or review online about a product they bought or a service they received
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
6

8. Among teens, Internet use is even heavier at
93%. (Purcell, 2011) All of these statistics indicate
that all Americans (and, in particular, teens who
are a primary target audience for the admission
group at DU) are increasingly using social media
sites on the Internet to research and comment on
products and services.
ird, there is an incredible amount of
digitized information available on the Internet
and it is being shared and moved in massive quantities. It was estimated that 500 billion gigabytes of
information was stored on the Internet in 2009 (e Guardian, 2010) Additionally, Internet traffic is
predicted to reach a total of 767 exabytes, or 64 exabytes per month (an exabyte is equal to a billion
gigabytes) by 2014. (Cisco, 2010) Digitized data allow information to be stored, manipulated and accessed
inde nitely.
In combination, these three trends can be leveraged by DU to con dently provide its varied audiences an
online “do-it-yourself ” customer service system that will be embraced while lowering the university’s
costs. How will cost be lowered? Two ways:
1. Reducing the number of responses to duplicate inquiries: once an answer is stored, people can be
directed to the archived answer in the future. is eliminates the effort needed to respond by an
employee.
2. Reducing the overall number of questions that need to be answered: since the system is based on a social
media model where people can freely participate and interact with the content, anyone using the system
can answer anyone else’s questions or be able to provide feedback, insight, etc. is reduces the amount
of inquiries an employee has to answer.
To determine what Get Satisfaction’s potential cost savings are to DU, we need to know how much
duplication would be eliminated as well as how many inquiries would be answered through a
crowdsourced model. e rst two of these numbers are difficult to compute accurately before the system
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
7

9. is running, but we can derive estimates based on internal metrics and the success rates of other Get
Satisfaction users. e cost of the tool is also an estimate, but can be accurately estimated. Costs are
computed using the following rationale.
Duplication Savings Calculation
University Communications categorizes all the customer service emails received from the DU website.
Based on those measures, it estimates an average reduction of 2% of email volume in the rst three months
of Get Satisfaction’s operation (mainly due to Get Satisfaction’s ability to reduce the amount of spam that
enters the stream), increasing to 5% within 6 months (as people are exposed to the system and driven to
use it) and then to 10% by the rst year’s end (staff is trained and the system is populated with a wide
variety of help topics). Using the cost gures per email given earlier, we learn that over the rst year, Get
Satisfaction would save a total of about $25,400 in duplication costs. Aer year 1, savings would total
approximately $37,650 based on a continued 10% reduction rate.
Yearly Cost Savings From Elimination of Duplication (based on 6,500 Emails/month rate)
Monthly # Emails Cost/Email # of Months Total Saved
2% Email Reduction 130 $4.83 3 $1,884
5% Email Reduction 325 $4.83 3 $4,709
10% Reduction 650 $4.83 6 $18,837
Total $25,430
Yearly Cost Savings From Elimination of Duplication (based on 8,500 Emails/month rate)
Monthly # Emails Cost/Email # of Months Total Saved
2% Email Reduction 170 $3.69 3 $1,882
5% Email Reduction 425 $3.69 3 $4,705
10% Reduction 850 $3.69 6 $18,819
Total $25,406
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
8

10. Crowdsourcing Savings Calculation
While the following statistic is used by Get Satisfaction for marketing purposes (and therefore skews
toward the most successful outcome), it gives insight for this portion of the analysis. A case study states
that Spring Partners, the maker of a note taking application, reduced the number of support emails it
received by 80% while seeing a rise in customers helping each other to solve problems without employee
intervention. (Get Satisfaction, 2011) ere is no indication what portion of the 80% reduction was due to
non-employee action, but it does lend support that crowdsourcing can happen in a customer service
setting. And the Pew Research Center again shows evidence that people can and do take actions relevant
to an online community as is found on Get Satisfaction: (Pew Internet, 2010)
• 32% of adults rate products, services or people using an online rating system
• 32% of adults post online comments or reviews about products bought or a services received
• 28% of adults categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story or blog post
ese types of activities are the hallmarks of the groups known as creators, conversationalists and critics
as de ned by authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in their book Groundswell: Winning in A World
Transformed By Social Technologies. e book’s companion interactive tool indicates that these groups
represent 46-50% of 18-24 year olds, 33-46% of 25-34 year olds, 23-34% of 35-44 year olds, 19-37% of
45-54 year olds and 12-18% of people 55 and older. (Forrester Research, 2009) Averaged out, these age
range percentages overlap the Pew Research Center numbers. We can apply the same averaged percentage
(32%) to our analysis given the supporting evidence from the two independent, concurring sources above.
Yearly Cost Savings From Crowdsourcing Effects
Yearly # Emails Cost/Email % Reduction Total Saved
6,500 Emails/Month Avg. 78,000 $4.83 32% $120,557
8,500 Emails/Month Avg. 120,000 $3.69 32% $141,696
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
9

11. is reduction in cost is estimated to range anywhere between $120,557-141,696 per year, but re ects
the savings DU should expect once the system is launched and constituents are regularly aware of and
using it. e cost savings will not be this high the rst year, but an exact amount will be contingent on how
quickly the tool can be rolled out, how quickly awareness and use build and how well the tool is
maintained on an ongoing basis to ensure that it is and continues to be of value through active moderation
on the part of DU staff. I estimate the rst year savings to be a quarter of this range, $30,139-35,424.
One area where Get Satisfaction cannot compete well with the current model is under circumstances
when an inquiry is too speci c to warrant a generic answer that others will nd value in. Some people will
also need to share personal data in order to nd resolution and neither the customer nor DU will want
that information to be part of the public sphere. While the system cannot eliminate these types of requests,
sensitive topics can be moved off the system and onto a private channel like email or telephone.
Other Considerations
Getting Get Satisfaction running smoothly for the university would require one-time cost for
implementation and ongoing costs for maintenance, training and moderation. However, other costs such
as a reduction in the amount of triage that a decentralized organization creates could be reduced. Further
research and analysis into these variables as well as into DU’s current customer service processes would
result in greater accuracy of gures and expectations.
Some bene ts and costs of this proposal are intangible variables and cannot be pegged to speci c dollar
amounts:
• A reduction in the amount of time spent by DU staff on customer service could result in cost reduction
through personnel reductions, but could also free managers to better utilize their employees.
• Users of the tool may be able to nd answers to their questions quicker and easier than they otherwise
would. is creates goodwill, better customer experiences and happier people.
• Analysis of Get Satisfaction’s statistics may uncover insights into problem areas for the university which
would otherwise go unseen and unknown.
• Additional areas of cost savings may materialize. Once such possibility is that Get Satisfaction integrates
with ZenDesk, a bug/problem ticketing system. University Technology Service’s Help Desk service uses a
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
10

12. ticketing system, but a switch to ZenDesk would make available to the world their technology centric
knowledge base which is currently locked inside that group.
Final Tally
An enterprise version of Get Satisfaction was quoted by a sales representative at the company to cost
$25,000/year. An exact gure would need to be nalized based on DU’s particular circumstances, but even
if the tool cost twice this amount, it would still pay for itself within its rst year of use. Adding both
duplication and crowdsourcing effect cost savings, Get Satisfaction would reduce expenses anywhere
between $50,539-55,824. In its second year, savings would reach between $140,957-162,096. In subsequent
years, costs could be reduced even further as the system is expanded to handle other areas of business
process, such as internal customer service support in addition to external support (for example, Human
Resources providing service to employees).
Recommendations
is analysis uses a multitude of estimates to arrive at costs and savings gures. Nonetheless, the
conclusion is readily evident: DU should purchase Get Satisfaction and incentivize all campus units to
adopt it. e net cost savings are signi cant (remember, this analysis only estimates savings for a single
division at DU) and many intangible bene ts exist including a richer website experience, quicker and more
efficient feedback on average and better insight for staff on problems, solutions and new opportunities.
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
11

13. References
Cisco. (2010, June 2). Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2009-2014. Retrieved
from the Cisco website, http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/
ns827/white_paper_c11-481360_ns827_Networking_Solutions_White_Paper.html
Customer Portfolio Management. (2011, February 28). Airline shis customer service away from call
centre [weblog message]. Retrieved from Call Centre blog,
http://www.callcentre.co.uk/ccf-news-content/full/airline-shis-customer-service-away-from-call-centre
Get Satisfaction. (2011). Retrieved March 2, 2011, from the Get Satisfaction website,
http://getsatisfaction.com/success-stories
Forrester Research. (2009). Retrieved March 3, 2011, from the Groundswell webiste,
http://www.forrester.com/empowered/tool_consumer.html
Pew Research Center. (2010, May). Retrieved March 2, 2011, from the Pew Internet & American Life
Project, http://www.pewinternet.org/Static-Pages/Trend-Data/Online-Activites-Total.aspx
Purcell, K. (2011, February 9). Retrieved March 2, 2011, from the Pew Internet & American Life
Project, Trends in Teen Communication and Social Media Use.
http://www.pewinternet.org/Presentations/2011/Feb/PIP-Girl-Scout-Webinar.aspx
University Communications. (2011). Retrieved February 28, 2011, from the University of Denver website,
http://blogs.du.edu/today/about/fast-facts-about-the-university-of-denver
University of Denver. (2011). Retrieved February 28, 2011, from the Google Analytics website,
https://www.google.com/analytics/
Wray, R. (2009, May 18). Internet data heads for 500bn gigabytes. Retrieved on March 2, 2011, from e
Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/18/digital-content-expansion
DU: University Communications // Proposal to Reduce Customer Service Costs at the University of Denver
12