Higher Ed Omnichannel Contact Centers Offer Improved Customer Service

What Does an Omnichannel Contact Center Look Like in Action?

At UC Riverside, an omnichannel solution “enhances our workflows, allowing us to move away from some antiquated phone trees,” Gunkel says. “It allows us to come together onto a singular platform, streamlining the overhead requirement for us to deploy, configure and set up a contact center.”

When people call in, they typically need to reach an individual in a specific area, “whether that’s financial aid, or they’re trying to transfer, or they have a very specific question about their program,” he says. The digital solution accelerates those connections.

Dallas College, meanwhile, has implemented Amazon Connect across various departments, including IT, human resources and student services. Deputy CIO Prakash Paul says this platform serves as the school’s primary solution for voice and SMS communications.

The system not only supports incoming calls, it enhances the school’s outbound efforts.

“One significant improvement has been the introduction of branded caller ID,” Paul says. “The name Dallas College now appears on the recipient’s phone, significantly reducing missed calls,” Paul says.

The digital solution is also helping the school to meet callers’ needs more effectively. “We have implemented SMS-based customer satisfaction surveys for callers who hang up before completing the voice survey, providing us with better feedback and enhancing service quality,” he says.

At Regent University, a cloud-based contact center from Five9 delivers phone calls, SMS, email and chat for inbound and outbound communications. It was a much-needed upgrade, says Joel Simons, executive director of operations and analytics.

“We were trying to scale our contact center operations without drastically increasing the number of staff we have in order to ultimately grow the student population,” Simons says. “In the absence of an omnichannel solution, we were required to manually dial, and our outreach strategy was largely inefficient.”

READ MORE: A community college moves phone systems to the cloud.

Now, when people call in, “we leverage our internal data based on the phone number they’re calling in from to route that call accordingly,” he says. Because calls go directly to the right people, “we can reduce the number of transfers that we need to make across our different departments.”

The solution helps the school address a critical staffing shortage.

“It is a very tough marketplace to hire people to work in a contact center. At any given point, about 25% of our contact center seats are open and vacant,” Simons says. Omnichannel efficiency enables the school “to find ways to do more with less.”

Omnichannel Contact Centers Incorporate Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence plays a growing role in today’s omnichannel contact center solutions.

Zoom, for example, offers a conversational AI agent that delivers “24/7 automated self-service across chat and voice, reasoning and taking action to solve common student questions about course enrollment, financial aid or even application statuses,” Morrissey says. During calls, the platform’s AI Expert Assist supports live agents. “It can suggest the next best response, surface relevant knowledge base content or highlight policy information in real time.”

At Dallas College, “we leverage AI-generated call summaries to enable supervisors and agents to efficiently review interactions, streamline issue resolution and enhance training,” Paul says. “We are also developing methods to automate SMS outreach for customer satisfaction surveys, further strengthening our knowledge and feedback loop.”

UC Riverside likewise makes use of the omnichannel solution’s built-in AI capabilities. “It’ll do the summaries and pull out keywords,” Gunkel says. “You can set it up so that it’s looking for particular things that we want to understand or pay close attention to.”

He hopes that in the near future, AI will deliver even more. “We’re looking at having it auto-trigger a ticket into our ticketing system, or actually make recommendations to us on when we should have people coming on” in the call center, he says.

AI could also elevate agent performance. “It could be listening to the user’s language and helping their manager provide relevant coaching or additional guidance and feedback,” he says. “Those are some of the new things that we’re currently evaluating and looking to deploy.”

Modern Contact Centers Meet a Business Need

As universities look to raise the bar on their communications strategies, some best practices can help drive a smooth deployment of an omnichannel contact center solution.

First, be clear on the desired outcomes.

“You really need to look at what the business wants to do, whether that’s in enrollment or the IT help desk or the clinic. What are they trying to accomplish by having a contact center?” Gunkel says.

A clear understanding here will help shape IT strategy. “When you go to build the maps and the workflows, you need to think about the things you want to track to build the appropriate dashboards,” he says. “When you do that first and then apply the tool on top, it just gets you that much further and it’s just that much more powerful.”

Vendor selection factors in as well. Omnichannel is a fast-changing space, and it’s important to work with a partner that can grow with the university’s changing needs.

“Choose a vendor that’s going to continue to innovate and evolve,” Simons says. “And don’t be afraid to make feature requests. You’re going to continually be finding areas that need additional development, additional improvement. Don’t be afraid to be the squeaky wheel in offering recommendations on how to improve.”

DISCOVER: Artificial intelligence transforms university contact centers.