Western Sydney University (WSU) has undergone a customer experience transformation project with emphasis on personalisation and a digital first student experience.
Chief information and digital officer Dr. Scott Snyder told Digital Nation the university had a dozen call centres ranging in size and an “antiquated” telephone management system.
HR services and student services, for example, had their own call centre.
“We needed to upgrade,” he said, adding that the challenge was “what is the vision we’re upgrading to?”
“How do we move beyond something that’s old and just answering the phone and not harvesting any data, not improving an overall user experience, no user orchestration of different interactions, different channels? How do we do a multi-step uplift in a short space of time?
“Then on top of that, looking forward, does the platform allow us to go to the next step in terms of AI integration?”
To achieve its new vision, Snyder said the team worked “hand in hand” with its largest call centre, the Student Services Hub, which receives 70 percent of calls a year from potential and current students.
Results seen so far include a “greater than a 50 percent improvement almost immediately in terms of our ability to service volume”, although Snyder said that “every metric we have has [improved by] between 50 and 90 percent.”
“There isn’t a slice of this that is haven’t improved dramatically. It’s quite remarkable in the statistics”.
Call satisfaction rates are better than they used to be,” he said.
“The experience orchestration is just something the students probably experience without saying, ‘Oh, this is better than it was six months ago’.”
Snyder said that while teaching used to be the most mission-critical part of a university, how the institution interacts with stakeholders and students has risen in stature.
Improvements in this space are “probably embedded in things like a student recruitment number”, he said.
Snyder added next steps for the university include continuing to widen its efforts.
“What we achieved in a year between a good package, good support, a very enthusiastic IT project team and a very enthusiastic business team, is we have implemented quite a radical change in in a year and much faster than we would have expected.
“What we’re doing next, we have more than a dozen call centres, a couple of large general ones, and then very specific ones.
“Most of the focus on business improvement has been around the large student-based contact centre. We now want to look at how we flow those changes to the other contact centres.”
Entrepreneurial assistance
The university is also making changes to how it connects the startup and entrepreneurial community in the Western Sydney area to assistance through its innovation hub, Launch Pad
“Launch Pad has a quite a large amount of support material. If you’re a local startup and you’re struggling with something, then then they can help you with it. But hey have too much demand to be able to address everybody’s requests for assistance.”
He said WSU began using Genesys to streamline access to knowledge.
“You can call, and you can begin to get responses back through the same system for your startup and entrepreneurial questions,” Snyder said.
“It means that Launch Pad can begin to support a much broader group of people without having to suddenly employ 20 more people.”