College costs may be at record levels, but the Office of Business and Financial Services wants to know how it can at least make the experience of paying a little easier.

The office sent out a mass e-mail on Aug. 30 announcing the beginning of the Customer Service Initiative. Students, faculty and other employees from all three University of Illinois campuses are being asked to provide feedback and suggestions on the ways the office handles transactions.

If customers are not satisfied with the services the office provides, such as processing tuition payments, they do not have another choice. But if customers become too dissatisfied, they may try to find ways around dealing with the office, said Doug Beckmann, senior associate vice president for business and finance.

Besides student accounts, the office also handles purchasing, payments and support for grants, contracts and sponsored research projects, according to the mass e-mail.

“I understand they can’t go to Wal-Mart or somewhere else to get these services,” Beckmann said. “In addition if it’s really hard, they’ll find ways to skirt the system. I want them to work through the front door…. It’s about cooperation.”

The project was conceived last October and will happen in five stages. Stage one is a “discovery phase” that asks customers what areas they think need to be improved and ways to improve them, said Dave Byers, functional team leader who works in training, performance development and communications.

“We don’t want to presuppose that we know what needs to be done,” Byers said.

There is no set time line for the project, but the first phase is expected to last at least one year. The office will be getting as much input as possible from the online survey, accessed through its Web site, www.obfs.uillinois.edu/csi/.

Feedback happened quickly after the mass e-mail, and the office has already had a large student response, Byers said.

“Many times people were saying they valued the service,” he said. But people had specific questions about tuition and other areas, which were forwarded to specific departments for answers, Byers said.

The second phase will get together focus groups, about 20 groups of 200, to look at examples of ways to improve service. This will help the office design a more focused survey to distribute to about 11,000 of the 122,000 customers on the list.

Realistically the plan could take three to five years in all, Byers said. But it really depends on what is learned through the research.

Other campus units have sought customer feedback in the past through surveys and informal phone calls, but Byers said the Office of Business and Financial Services hopes to develop a method to be constantly aware of problems.

“You need to have customer data on a regular basis if you’re going to be able to respond,” Byers said. “We wanted to create more formal types of connecting points … so that we can do something with it.”