Organizations across all industries, including higher education, have more access to data than they’ve ever had before, but they’re still evolving when it comes to transforming that data into actionable insights.
This transformation is especially crucial for customer experience strategies. Today’s consumers — and the employees who make customer support services run — expect more personalization and a more seamless experience when they interact with an organization’s contact center. According to 2022 Gartner research, a majority of consumers expect organizations to be knowledgeable about their personal information during service interactions.
And consumers, including college students paying thousands of dollars to attend, aren’t the only ones who want a good experience; staff members are valuable end users who also are looking for a coherent, connected journey so they can better assist the people who reach out for their help. A sound CX strategy can mitigate staff burnout and improve efficiency to relieve employees of repetitive tasks so they can focus on high-level problem-solving.
As data analytics and solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) improve, organizations will be better equipped to act on user feedback to provide a more personalized, smoother experience so that students and staff members have better interactions.
Click the banner to freshen up the student experience on your campus.
Personalizing the Student Experience
A personalized CX journey might have once involved receiving an email with deals tailored to your interests. That may still happen today, but the interaction is now informed by more real-time data and analytics. Universities are striving to connect students across platforms, whether their entry point is on social media or via the institution’s website.
Because CX can be tailored to specific users, CX strategies should be tailored to institutions’ needs, depending on the departments that need to be connected, such as admissions, academics, public safety, research, facilities, marketing, finance, IT and more. The ability to leverage data with analytics and AI can transform an organization from surviving to thriving.
“Even outside the contact center, AI tools can deliver insights that allow companies to provide personalized messaging and interactions that simply were not possible just a few years ago. Sophisticated AI tools trawl information gleaned from thousands of customer interactions — including browsing and purchase history, social media interactions, demographic trends, previous customer service interactions and customer survey data — to target customers with timely, hyper-personalized offers,” a recent CDW white paper notes.
63%
Percentage of customers who feel that companies need to be better at listening to feedback
Source: Qualtrics, "2024 Global Consumer Trends Report," Nov. 15, 2023
Advancements in AI for the Contact Center
As AI continues to interest leaders in all industries, major vendors have been fine-tuning their solutions to better incorporate AI-powered features.
Cisco, for instance, has been testing its AI assistant for Webex for hybrid work and CX. Customer feedback has shown that it reduces agent response times and helps provide agents with more context for interactions. Google Cloud is also using generative AI to help with live transcriptions and structured summaries in the contact center.
“A team that is fully engaged and really proud of what they do is likely to engage with customers at a very high level, and customers feel it,” Ron Thurston, co-founder of retail recruitment agency OSSY, says in a Microsoft blog post.
According to research by Qualtrics, 63% of consumers feel that companies need to be better at listening to feedback, and a majority would buy more if businesses treated them better: “In today’s business environment — where omnichannel interactions are the norm — that can only really be achieved by augmenting human customer service agents with AI,” notes the company’s website.
CX should not be thought of as a burdensome budget item but as a real value-add and business opportunity. When colleges and universities can revitalize their CX strategies to the satisfaction of students and employees, they’ll find that they’re not only improving student retention but also improving retention in IT, a department that typically experiences high turnover.
Leaning toward CX platforms that are deploying AI in relevant ways to make the journey easier can set up organizations for success. Structured summaries are one way to create a smoother CX journey so that live agents can properly assist consumers from self-service options. Emerging features that can detect the emotional levels of call center staff can improve agent support by suggesting a break or rerouting calls to other agents.
