Financial Stewardship and Customer Service
“Stewardship is an ethic (a set of principles) that embodies responsible planning and management of resources. The concept of stewardship has been applied in diverse realms, including with respect to environment, economics, health, property, information, and religion…”
The question for us in higher education is how can we be good stewards in the role we play at our institution, while providing excellent customer service?
Staff, faculty, and administrators all have a role to play in creating positive synergy to educate the “whole student”, not just educating students in the classroom. This means collectively we should provide learning experiences and opportunities through various programs and services designed to prepare the student to be successful in the global community. Many of these experiences and opportunities involve volunteering for public service projects, understanding the value and sensitivity of diversity, and becoming capable and competent in financial matters.
Each semester students register for classes, execute residence hall contracts, and sign up for meal plans. These student activities create agreements with the institution, generating charges and a student receivable. The Bursar’s Office, as the institutional financial steward of student receivables, manages all aspects of these receivables and must strive to use current best practices to effectively serve all the related constituents of the institution.
The Bursar’s Office mission, therefore, is to implement appropriate controls to ensure that charges, credits, and payments are processed accurately and in a timely way. Additionally, the Bursar’s Office is responsible for providing input to the institution’s philosophy for managing student receivables, and for providing excellent customer service to students and their families.
The goal in every bursar office is to successfully resolve every customer (student, parent, faculty, and administrator) encounter within the constraints of federal, state, and local regulations as well as university policies.
Achieving Your Objectives in the Bursar Office
To accomplish the above, the following six tenets should be adopted. All these tenets are implied in the former focusEDU article on customer services.
- It is vitally important that a continuous review of best practices is conducted and implemented when appropriate.
- Automate production-type processes. Staff should be interacting with customers, not scheduling IT jobs.
- It is vitally important that staff are knowledgeable and well trained in the use of software and active listening.
- Quickly identifying the right question/issue of a customer and offering options (if multiple options exist) sends the right message to the customer.
- Always smile, especially while talking on the phone.
- Customer service standards should be developed by a work team representing the Registrar’s Office, the Financial Aid Office, and the Bursar’s Office. All three offices should adopt these standards.
How can we be good financial stewards in our role in managing the institutional resources of our institution? We must focus on the operational processes, procedures, analytics, and policies that govern the day-to-day environment.
