Back to Case studySmartflo Helps Top University Overhaul its On-Call Support to Students
ShareIntroduction
The customer is a Punjab-based, UGC-recognised university established in 2014. It has a lively campus with modern classrooms, a well-stocked library, sports amenities, hostels, gyms, and banking services. The university has earned its repute for high academic standards and research facilities by offering courses in engineering, pharmaceutical sciences, dentistry, management, hospitality, agriculture, nursing, and law.
The university needed a full-featured contact centre to handle admission enquiries for different academic programmes. The service was also required for outbound communication to update students and their parents on matters such as fee reminders, changes in a course, examination dates, and the holiday calendar, among others.
The university chose Tata Tele Business Services’ (TTBS’) Smartflo to deploy a contact centre because of its advantages as a cloud-native platform. Ease of scalability, seamless integration with other applications, and intuitive dashboards to measure agent performance were some of the features that drew them to the product.
Business Challenges
The university’s administrative team had to build their contact centre from the ground up with inbound and outbound calling facilities. They did not want to base it on infrastructure involving multipart equipment or disjointed devices for calls and data access. To avoid such issues, the best alternative was to implement a web-based centre.
At the same time, there were some specific expectations from such a cloud platform:
- The university wanted to use the contact centre in generating new leads for admissions in regular and short-term/distance learning courses.
- The incoming inquiries for admission were to be handled by dedicated counsellors.
- All calls were also to be recorded for compliance audits and performance monitoring.
The cloud contact centre’s interface was to be integrated with the college’s NPF application. It also needed integration with a database containing details of students and their fee records. This would help the staff in sending reminders for timely deposits and missed payments if any.
TTBS Solution
For a university that was ready to extend the reach of its courses to more and more students, it was critical to deploy a functionally rich contact centre for lead generation and query resolution. TTBS offered Smartflo to give the team a managed, secure, enterprise-grade cloud communication suite and hosted PBX service.
- We created a dialplan for the customer with simple IVR menus and intelligent call routing. It was also integrated with the college’s NPF application. The leads for outbound calls could be pushed to a hosted PBX platform from NPF CRM via API integration.
- Communication with existing students and their parents was enabled with data-based outbound calling.
- The click-to-call feature on Smartflo helped in quicker connections on the dialled phone numbers. The numbers to be called were stored and picked directly from NPF CRM. Agents could seamlessly initiate one-toone calls in this setup.
- Handling the incoming calls for questions on academic courses was simplified. The calls were routed to special counsellors as per the nature of queries they were trained to answer. The CRM integration gave them updated information about the number of seats available, the fee for the courses being solicited, and other details to be given to admission seekers.
The call detail records (CDRs) could be downloaded directly from Smartflo’s cloud interface. It also enabled call recording for quality analysis, compliance assurance, and performance feedback.
Having a web-based infrastructure, Smartflo can be used by the university’s teams from any location. TTBS offers round-the-clock support to its customer along with uptime of 99.5% guaranteed under an SLA.
Benefits
- Smartflo: Data-enriched platform with browser access for broadcasting and inbound and outbound communication
- Remote call management abilities with number masking while using mobiles
- High productivity with integrated call management features, including click-to-call, hold, and transfer buttons
- Cost savings on traditional contact centre configuration
- Admin portal for customisation of IVR and call routing
- Future-ready solution with effortless scalability
- Lucid dashboards with reports on call volumes, staffed time, average handling time, and other performance parameters
