Back to Case studyA pioneering educational institution digitally transforms oncall support services using Smartflo
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Established in 2001 in Hyderabad’s Cybercity, the college provides affordable quality education to students and helps them nurture their talents for strong career-building abilities. It is affiliated to the Board of Intermediate Education (Andhra Pradesh) for intermediate-level curriculum and to Osmania University for graduate courses.
The institution needed its own contact centre setup to handle inquiries from students, parents, and associated entities. The requirement was amplified following the pandemic breakout when visits to the campus practically stopped, and more people wanted to use telephony services.
After getting acquainted with the features of Smartflo – Tata Tele Business Services (TTBS) cloud communication suite – the administration heads chose it for their organisation. The ease of dialling out calls virtually from a web interface and IVR-based automatic call distribution (ACD) were some attributes they found appealing.
Business Challenges
The college wanted to deploy its contact centre for both incoming and outgoing call flows. Infrastructure had to be set up on the cloud, given that arranging physical connection with multiple PRI lines was unfeasible. The institution’s legacy phone service was also incapable of handling the incoming call volumes.
Other challenges necessitating the deployment of a more versatile contact centre were:
- When the pandemic disrupted normal operations, staff members working from home needed a telephony solution accessible from any location to answer students’ queries.
- The team used personal mobile phones to call students and parents for important updates and follow-ups but felt the need to keep their numbers masked.
- Facilities for call monitoring, recording, and reports on call flows were required to make the contact centre operations more productive and valuable for students.
The institution’s mission is to ensure that students have access to all the information they need while choosing and completing the academic courses. Implementing a contact centre service in a short timeframe was essential to maintain seamless communications, and migrating to the cloud was the best decision in the scenario.
TTBS Solution
TTBS had already given a preview of Smartflo’s features to the customer’s team, providing 30 channels with this service as per their requirement.
Smartflo is a cloud-native platform for calling and can be used on any desktop or mobile device with Windows, iOS, or Android operating system. The employees also found it easy to understand its functionalities, getting ready to make and receive calls within a few hours of deployment. It made their call management tasks more productive and yielded immediate ROI.
- Our solution architects configured a multilevel IVR to automatically route calls to different departments as per callers’ inputs.
- The inbound and outbound services were also supported by call patching, enabling the agents to transfer an ongoing call to subject matter experts, teachers, or admin staff as required.
- User management for Smartflo was tailored for different roles, allowing authorised supervisors to barge into calls, use the whispering feature to assist an agent, and record live conversations for future reference.
Smartflo could be integrated with the institution’s website and any other application for storing student and staff records. It offered the click-to-call facility for outbound communication, which simplified follow-ups with students interested in particular programmes and wanting to learn more about the admission process.
When the agents used the mobile application for calling, their personal numbers remained masked.
Agents managing the call flow could make quick notes on the user-friendly web interface at the end of every conversation. The supervisors could also check daily call logs and use Smartflo’s reporting and analytics features to gauge the nature of the inquiries they had been receiving.
TTBS has secured Smartflo communication with 128-bit encryption, and we guarantee SLA-backed availability of 99.5%.
Benefits
- Improved workforce productivity by avoiding the struggles related to dated telephony systems
- Ease of scalability to handle more calls with the increase in student enrolments
- Optimised query resolution rate built by IVR-routed calls to relevant departments
- Full-featured contact centre without the burden of maintaining physical groundwork
- Work-from-anywhere flexibility offered by the cloud-native platform
