Supporting customers through their application journey
Source: gov.uk (2025-05-15)

Steven Darling, Customer Experience Director, explains SLC's approach to supporting customers.

SLC has more than nine million customers which includes new and returning students as well as customers who are now repaying their loans - and this number grows every year.

Around 1.5 million applications are submitted annually by students for tuition fees and maintenance loans to support their academic aspirations - (there are also more specific loans and grants available, including Parents’ Learning Allowance and Disabled Students’ Allowance for eligible students) – so it’s easy to see how our business has continued to grow over the last 30+ years.

With this evolution comes opportunities as well as challenges, especially against a backdrop of changes in consumer behaviour and the monumental shift to digital technologies that has far advanced anything we could have imagined when SLC was in its infancy.

SLC’s digital services are amongst the most frequently used in the public sector. Between our ‘Apply for Student Finance’ and ‘Manage my balance’ digital services, we handle around 75m interactions every year, which equates to roughly 94% of all our customer interactions. The vast majority of our customers expect their experience with SLC to be entirely digital and just as good as the experiences they have with organisations in the private sector – easy, fast and with minimal effort.

Meeting these expectations and delivering improvements to our digital services is a significant piece of work and will take time. But I am pleased to say, we are making progress.

Central to these improvements is enabling our customers to fully self-serve in their online accounts and more services are being added regularly– for example our digital refund service launched last year with customers now being able to request a refund online, if their earnings are below the annual threshold.

Our customers also want features within their online account to support them through a self-serve experience. This is why we have created a range of self-help tools including our application tracker and virtual assistant, as well as common question articles to support customers with any questions that they may have.

Unlike other application processes that students may have encountered through a bank or mobile provider, it can take around six to eight weeks for a student finance application to be processed and approved. This is because most students apply at the same time each year and a range of checks need to be undertaken to verify customer details, as well as ensure the eligibility criteria is met.

SLC is striving to deliver a fast and seamless experience, but sometimes those processes and checks happening in the background can prolong the length of time it takes for a customer’s application to progress through its journey.

We also understand this can be an anxious wait for customers and our online application status tracker is designed to keep customers fully informed of progress and any actions they need to complete to progress through their journey.

Most of the interactions our customers have with us happen online, and more and more customers are getting updates and tracking their progress there, SLC can devote even more effort to processing applications and getting customer accounts ‘ready to pay’ in time for term start.

But we are always here to support our customers, and we’ve recently aligned our customer contact teams across our business to provide a more streamlined experience and expanded our Live Chat team. Our Live Chat service is available to customers through their online account and is a fast alternative to calling.

We are heading into our busiest period. Exams will soon be over, and customers will start to look at the university to-do list which is where student finance usually comes to the forefront. This is why we’ve been reminding and encouraging customers to get ahead and apply for student finance asap.

SLC data showed that 45% of applications were received after the application deadline last year, but applying before the deadline (16 May 2025) is the best way to ensure that funding is in place for the start of the 25/26 academic year. Customers can apply even if they don’t have a confirmed place at university or college (read all of our top tips here (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/almost-half-of-new-students-in-england-missed-the-student-finance-deadline-last-year)) and we’ve already received 630,000 applications since we opened our application window earlier this year, and our Customer Operations team have more in the ‘ready to pay’ status than ever before, which is encouraging.

So, with the application deadline approaching, I would encourage students to make sure their student finance application is in and sit back and let us handle the rest.