Contact Center Innovations: Improving the Prospect, Student, and Employee Experience

The past year has tested the adaptability of institutions, requiring most to consider how to recruit and support students, despite the challenges faced during the pandemic. At the core of the most successful strategies is a focus on the student and employee experience. Valdosta State University built a HyFlex learning environment with the goal of providing identical learning experiences to face-to-face and remote students. The university's call center, the Solutions Center, was leveraged to recruit new students, support outbound engagements, and provide excellent customer and concierge services to applicants. This strategy was a significant contributor that resulted in the largest new student population in the university's history. This session will review successes across various approaches and strategies by VSU and Deloitte for future growth, transforming traditional call centers to digital contact centers, technology assessments, IVR enhancements, and workforce management analyses. These include initial philosophy and design, and forming a culture that values diversity, analytics, knowledge management, governance, and service excellence. Additionally, we will review Deloitte’s Digital Contact Center, which combines more than a dozen products into a single, fully integrated enterprise to support small or large operations with thousands of agents. Attendees will take away the importance of contact centers in higher education and the broader impact on improving the student experience.