While students’ lives are by definition about academic performance, it’s easy to forget that they are also paying customers navigating years as a consumer of a college’s services. Settling administrative issues is notoriously difficult, as schools often don’t have the kind of back-office resources as for-profit companies. In an effort to help solve the problem, one company has adapted its cloud contact center to academics.
Intelligent customer experience solutions provider Five9 recently launched a new solution that has been custom crafted for the education industry, Five9 OneStudent. The cloud-based contact center solution aims to redefine student engagement so higher education institutions can adapt and thrive as they experience unforeseen pressures and rapid changes in student expectations.
Five9 noted that the challenge of managing student engagement starts with recruitment and ends with alumni relations. Moving contact centers to the cloud permits IT to become more agile in its pursuit of digital transformation by offloading the maintenance and upkeep to the cloud provider. Plus, by moving all contact centers to the same cloud provider, the data from student conversations gets normalized, which improves insight into each institution’s unique issues with student engagement.
With Five9 OneStudent, higher educational institutions can engage students on the channel of their choice, including voice, SMS, chat, social, video and more; improve advisor productivity with omni-channel controls and data integration, while giving managers better visibility into their performance; and bring overall agility and scalability across all contact centers while moving operations into the cloud, with all the associated cost savings and multichannel benefits across academic departments and campuses.
“Student expectations have dramatically shifted,” noted Jeff Woodland, director of industry marketing at Five9, in a statement. “They want rapid answers to conversations that cross channels of their choice. Attention spans are brief. For example, prospective students won’t wait for an answer about financial aid from one institution when Google can provide other alternatives in one click. But many institutions are stuck with legacy systems, fierce departmental rivalries over IT budget dollars, and a student workforce manning the phones and chats that insists technology be easy to use.”
Edited by
Greg Tavarez
