Case Study: University of Minnesota achieves streamlined student services and major cost savings with Salesforce for Nonprofits

UMN Makes the Student Services Connection with Salesforce

The University of Minnesota, a public research university of more than 51,000 students, found that its One Stop Student Services center had no consistent way to track who staff were helping, what questions were coming in, or how efficiently cases were handled. Data was siloed across multiple systems, forcing students to repeat their issues and preventing the university from getting a 360-degree view of constituents or proactively addressing common questions.

The university deployed Salesforce (Sales and Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Pardot, Live Agent/Live Message) to centralize case and contact management, web-to-case tracking, a knowledge base, and a custom walk‑in queue, retiring several homegrown and third‑party systems. Within months they identified that 40–50% of inquiries were basic, shifted those to student tier‑one reps (replacing four professional FTEs), improved transparency and efficiency, and used proactive outreach to get 1,100 at‑risk students to pay bills and re-enroll.

The University of Minnesota

Carrie Otto

Associate Director of Customer Relationship Management