GM505 Unit 4 Financial Aid Phone Diagnostic Report Example

The Letter Behind the Phone Calls: A Unit 4 Diagnostic Report for a College Financial Aid Office

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM505: Action Research and Consulting Skills

Unit 4 Diagnostic Report

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The college, its staff, its students and every count are composite and illustrative; the methods and studies cited are real.

The Presenting Problem

In her request for this work, the dean wrote: "Students are telling us our advisors are rude and that they can't get through on the phone. I want the office to do a customer service refresher before spring." Thirty-seven complaint emails reached her office during the fall verification period, most of them about long waits and several about advisors' tone.

Three Explanations

Advisor courtesy. Advisors are curt or unhelpful on the phone, which frustrates students and generates complaints.

Volume beyond staffing. Calls during the fall peak exceed what six advisors can answer, so waits are long and frustration spills into the calls that get through.

A process that manufactures calls. Something in the verification workflow makes students call repeatedly, inflating volume and frustration.

The three are not exclusive, and the diagnosis aims to judge how much each contributes.

Methods

Over two weeks in late September, advisors coded 610 calls by their main reason using five categories agreed in advance. I traced forty verification files from the date the request letter was sent to the date the file was complete, recording each upload and each call from the student. And I spent three mornings at the processing desk observing how the senior processor reviewed files. Because I am an advisor in this office, I also kept a journal of my own reactions, which I will draw on in a later reflexivity analysis.

Exhibit 1: Why Students Call

Of the 610 coded calls, 241, about 40 percent, were status questions about requested documents: whether a form had arrived, what was still missing or why aid had not been finalized. Another 104, 17 percent, were questions about how to complete a requested document. Questions about award amounts made up 98 calls, disbursement and refund timing 79, and other reasons 88.

Taken together, 345 calls, 57 percent of all traffic, concerned the verification documents.

Tracing the Files

Of the forty traced files, 26 were incomplete on first submission. The median file needed 2.6 uploads before it was complete and took 19 days from request letter to completed review. Students with incomplete first submissions called a median of three times before their file was complete; students with complete first submissions called a median of once.

The request letter explains why. It lists required items by their federal form names, such as "IRS Tax Return Transcript" and "V1 Verification Worksheet," with no description of what each is or where to get it. Several students uploaded a copy of their tax return instead of the transcript, a common confusion. Research on federal student aid has found that the complexity of aid paperwork deters and delays students, and that help with the forms themselves changes outcomes substantially (Dynarski & Scott-Clayton, 2006; Bettinger et al., 2012).

Observing the Processing Desk

The senior processor reviews files in the order they arrive. When she finds a missing or incorrect item, she sends a standard email to the student. She does not record in the file what was missing, so advisors answering a status call cannot see why the file is on hold. Advisors therefore tell the student they will check and call back, or ask the student to call again, which adds another call.

Exhibit 2: The Loop

The evidence forms a loop. An unclear letter produces incomplete uploads. Incomplete uploads lengthen the review queue, because each file is reviewed more than once. A longer queue generates status calls. Status calls keep advisors on the phones and away from helping students complete their files. And because advisors cannot see why a file is on hold, many status calls end without an answer and produce another call.

The office is not mainly answering students' questions about financial aid; it is answering questions its own letter and its own invisible file notes create.

Verdicts

Advisor courtesy: partly supported, weak contribution. Of the 610 calls, 14 included a complaint about an advisor's tone. A review of thirty recorded calls found three in which an advisor was noticeably curt, all during the busiest hours. Courtesy is a real but small part of the problem, and it appears to worsen under volume pressure. Strength of evidence: moderate.

Volume beyond staffing: supported, but a consequence more than a cause. Peak-week volume did exceed advisors' capacity, with average holds of 23 minutes. But 57 percent of that volume concerned verification documents, and much of it was repeat calls. Reducing repeat calls would reduce volume without new staff. Strength of evidence: strong.

A process that manufactures calls: strongly supported, main contribution. The call coding, the file tracing and the observation all point to the request letter and the missing file notes as the largest source of calls. Strength of evidence: strong, from three independent sources.

What the Diagnosis Suggests

A customer service refresher would address the smallest of the three causes. A clearer letter and visible file notes would address the largest. The diagnosis also points at the dean's live-answer rule as a possible contributor, since keeping all six advisors on the phones during peaks leaves no one to help students complete files, but testing that would require a later phase.

How the Staff Responded

Following the contract, I presented these findings to the office staff before the dean. The advisors recognized the status-call pattern at once; several said they had stopped explaining the letter on the phone because it took too long. The senior processor was surprised by how many calls her missing notes produced and said she had assumed advisors could see her emails to students, which they cannot. The director asked whether the courtesy complaints should simply be dropped. The staff agreed they should not, since three curt calls in thirty is still too many, but that a refresher alone would leave the larger causes in place. Diagnosis in action research is meant to be worked out alongside the staff who must act on it rather than handed down, and this meeting was where the diagnosis became the office's own (Coghlan & Brannick, 2014).

Limits

Two weeks of calls may not represent the whole season. Advisors coded their own calls, which may have shaped how they categorized difficult ones. Forty files is a small sample. And my position as an advisor means I may have been inclined to find a process problem rather than a people problem, which is why the call coding and the file tracing were designed before I looked at the results.

References

Bettinger, E. P., Long, B. T., Oreopoulos, P., & Sanbonmatsu, L. (2012). The role of application assistance and information in college decisions: Results from the H&R Block FAFSA experiment. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127(3), 1205-1242. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjs017

Coghlan, D., & Brannick, T. (2014). Doing action research in your own organization (4th ed.). Sage.

Dynarski, S. M., & Scott-Clayton, J. E. (2006). The cost of complexity in federal student aid: Lessons from optimal tax theory and behavioral economics. National Tax Journal, 59(2), 319-356. https://doi.org/10.17310/ntj.2006.2.07