Back to Case studyEsteemed Higher Education Institute Improves Helpdesk Service by Embracing Cloud Telephony with Smartflo
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The reputed higher educational institution based at Ghaziabad (Uttar Pradesh), and privately run, offered various programmes in the fields of Management, IT, Law, and Education. These programmes are approved by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The institution is affiliated with Abdul Kalam Technical University (AKTU) - Lucknow.
With a vision to groom professionals who would pilot the future of revolutions, the institution believes that the spirit to imbibe excellence must be engendered in an individual’s personality framework and become a habit.
The institution offered a wide range of facilities to its students. The campus and infrastructure included a well-stocked library, Wi-Fi service, auditorium, conference halls, cafeteria, hostels, sports facilities, and medical solutions in addition to spacious rooms for daily lectures. The institution wanted to improve its voice-based helpdesk services using a system that would permit them to route calls efficiently, check daily call analytics, and trace the phone numbers of unattended calls. The team displayed a keen interest in Tata Tele Business Services’ (TTBS’) cloud communication suite, Smartflo, after delving into its features and benefits on the website.
After receiving a detailed demonstration of the solution and realising that it did not require any physical infrastructure, they asked us to deploy the cloud platform for their institution.
Business Challenges
While the institution’s administration team had been prompt in responding to incoming phone calls when they were on their office desks, they could not keep any track of the ones received during non-business hours. A few of these were admissions or programme-related queries of students or their parents.
Missed phone calls from prospective students translated to the loss of revenue for the institution, needing urgent resolution. In addition to potential revenue loss, the perceived indifferent response of management to incoming calls also affected the brand image of the organisation.
The legacy phone setup did not allow the users to trace the numbers of missed calls, and it also lacked other features that modern cloud telephony platforms offered:
- There was no mechanism to record live calls for future reference, and the system did not document call logs to trace phone numbers and call durations.
- Call routing and distribution were unorganised due to the lack of an IVR on the main line.
- Scaling the phone setup to handle more calls during certain times of the year – such as the start of new academic sessions – was not feasible, and the capacity of lines could be increased only by investing in additional hardware.
The organisation was looking for a feature-packed communication suite with flexible infrastructure which would allow its staff to accept and make calls from any location. It also wanted a certain degree of automation to send pre-recorded messages to multiple students in minimum time.
TTBS Solution
TTBS deployed Smartflo for the educational institution and configured its settings as per their staff’s specific requirements. We customised the IVR to connect all admission-related queries to relevant team members. The sticky agent feature helped repeat callers reach the same contact person they had spoken to earlier. It reduced the call handling time as callers did not have to repeat their queries.
Smartflo brought a web-based dashboard that offered all details on calls dialled, received, and missed. The team could check the numbers of missed calls and arrange for prompt call-backs using the outbound dialler service.
With Smartflo’s bespoke cloud telephony features, the institution also benefited in other ways:
- As per their profile’s authorisation level, team members could record any call directly from Smartflo’s web interface and store the audio file locally or in the cloud. These clips helped analyse call handlers’ performance and made it simple for the institution to refer back to an interaction when required.
- The customisable IVR made call routing and distribution systematic for efficient operations.
- To scale the inbound and outbound calling service the organisation had to simply call TTBS and we could activate new channels on the application for immediate use.
Smartflo’s array of call management features and hardware-free nature made it a valuable service. Users could log in to it on any connected device from anywhere and simply had to use a softphone client to make, receive, or barge into calls as per their role in the institution.
The teams were also able to send broadcasting messages to multiple phone numbers for updating students and their parents on any matter.
TTBS offered the solution with an SLA promising 99.5% uptime.
Benefits
- Smartflo: Stronger brand equity with timely reverts on missed calls
- Organised call routing through custom IVR
- Better business intelligence with indepth data on daily callflow
- Improved helpline for existing students with seamless CRM integration
- Work-from-anywhere agility offered by cloudbased architecture
- Cost-effective scalability eliminating the need to deploy more hardware for high call volumes
