10 Best Practices for Higher Education Contact Centers

Delivering exceptional experiences to alumni, students, and staff members is crucial for any higher education institution. The “customer experience” your team provides influences everything from student engagement and retention rates to your school’s reputation. 

Even if you don’t have a traditional contact center — think of a room filled with people at desks answering phones — you likely still have a team of professionals dedicated to handling common customer service tasks. These team members can use contact center software to onboard new students, connect with alumni, support staff members, and deal with common questions.  

Making sure you’re following contact center best practices is the key to boosting the efficiency of your team and earning the loyalty of your community.  

Here, we’ll share our top ten strategies for higher education institutions looking to optimize their contact centers.  

What is a Higher Education Contact Center? 

A higher education contact center is a department within a university or college designed to handle inquiries, interactions, and support requests. The agents or team members within your contact center might manage support requests from staff and students, interact with parents and alumni, and even implement outreach campaigns. 

Unlike call centers, modern contact centers leverage a range of different communication channels to facilitate these interactions, ranging from phone and video calls to instant messaging and SMS. Contact center technology has come a long way and now encompasses knowledge management systems, CRM integrations, automated response systems, and advanced AI tools.    

Though higher education contact centers can be similar to contact centers used by businesses in other industries, there are a few core differences.  

For instance, higher education institutions often deal with a wider range of queries related to admissions support, financial aid, technical support, student services, and alumni relations. Quite often, they’re also responsible for crisis management and emergency notifications.  

Best Practices for Higher Education Contact Centers 

As the central communication hub for your school, contact centers play an important role in your organization’s success. If you want to deliver the best possible experiences to staff, students and alumni, here are the best practices to follow.  

1. Offer Self-Service Options 

67% of today’s consumers say they prefer to use self-service methods to address common problems. This is particularly common among the younger population, including students, who are used to searching for answers to questions online and interacting with chatbots.  

Giving your community access to the right self-service solutions, whether it’s an FAQ page on your website, a knowledge base, or even an intelligent chatbot can deliver a host of benefits. First, it helps to ensure faculty, students, parents, and other stakeholders can receive 24/7 support without having to wait in a queue to speak to an agent. 

What’s more, because self-service options help to reduce the volume of inquiries passed to agents, it ensures your team members can spend more time focusing on more complex tasks, such as helping students fill out forms for financial aid or requesting feedback from alumni.  

2. Use Omnichannel Communication  

Students today want to be able to connect with higher education institutions on the channels they use most. These channels include SMS, web chat, and social media. However, simply embracing multiple channels isn’t enough to deliver a great customer experience.  

A multichannel contact center might allow you to interact with stakeholders on various channels, but the lack of connectivity between those channels means context is often lost as users move from one platform to the next. An omnichannel approach, on the other hand, ensures the retention of crucial data throughout the conversation.  

With an omnichannel contact center that integrates with your CRM and knowledge management systems, you can create a centralized platform for handling all student interactions. This helps agents deliver more personalized and consistent experiences to every person who contacts them and reduces the need for contacts to repeat themselves.  

3. Train Staff Regularly  

Customer expectations are constantly evolving, particularly in the higher education landscape. Younger students, such as those belonging to Gen Z, have very specific expectations when it comes to receiving support quickly and getting highly personalized assistance. 

To ensure you can meet these expectations, you need to focus on giving your staff members the right training. Training team members in soft skills — like the ability to show empathy and compassion, how to actively listen to customers, and communicate clearly — is essential in this day and age.   

Additionally, team members need to be trained in technical skills. For example, showing them how to use new communication platforms for AI or outbound campaign tools can make them more efficient and productive in their roles.  

As a bonus, regular training can help to boost employee retention rates, reducing how often you have to hire new team members.  

4. Mine Your Data 

The right data is crucial to discovering what your higher education contact center is doing well and where it needs to improve. Gathering insights on customer service quality, average handling times, customer satisfaction rates, and more will help you make intelligent decisions about how to improve your customer service strategy. Plus, it can help with more efficient resource allocation. 

Historical insights into call volumes can help you prepare for peaks in demand in the contact center and highlight common customer queries. This data can also help with creating self-service assets. Real-time monitoring, on the other hand, can provide instant insights into potential risks and opportunities. 

For example, supervisors can use real-time dashboards to detect when a contact’s sentiment changes and jump in to intervene or assist. The more data you gather, the more you’ll be able to effectively optimize your contact center strategy over time.  

5. Personalize Interactions 

McKinsey research shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% feel frustrated when they don’t. Just as personalization can help to increase conversion rates and customer loyalty in other sectors, it is equally important for educational institutions too.   

Personalizing interactions gives you an opportunity to strengthen relationships with your students and alumni. For example, it can help you guide students towards the right resources for their needs and boost your enrollment numbers. Plus, it has a direct impact on your organization’s reputation.  

To deliver personalized experiences, start by leveraging CRM integrations within your contact center to maintain detailed records of all of your contacts. Make sure this information is easy for your agents to access. You can also consider using AI tools to provide personalized recommendations and guidance to team members in real-time as they deal with common calls and queries.  

6. Leverage AI and Automation  

Artificial intelligence is one of the most valuable resources for today’s contact centers. And as it turns out, AI and automation can work together to support higher education contact centers in a variety of ways. For example, you can use various AI tools to automatically extract insights from conversations — such as sentiment analysis and common phrases — and drive better decision making. 

Conversational AI tools can also automate different customer interactions, handling things like providing status updates on applications or troubleshooting technical problems via an intelligent IVR system. Plus, AI and automation can even improve the performance of your team members.   

AI agent assistants can guide employees through conversations and provide real-time suggestions or automatically write responses using generative AI. They can also automate repetitive tasks like transcribing calls or filling out post-call forms.   

7. Ensure Data Security  

Data security and compliance should be priorities for every contact center, no matter what industry they’re in. However, security is particularly important in the higher education sector, where institutions are constantly dealing with large volumes of sensitive data. The rising occurrence of phishing scams, ransomware attacks, and data breaches makes it extremely important to think carefully about how you’ll safeguard your data.  

When implementing data security policies, make sure to consider how you will record calls for compliance purposes. Ensure you’re taking secure steps when storing and collecting financial data, student records, and personal data with end-to-end encryption, strong access controls, and regular audits.

If you regularly manage payments through your contact center, ensure the solution you’re using is PCI compliant and regularly train your employees on how to avoid common risks.  

8. Manage Your Workforce Efficiently   

Higher education contact centers are usually brimming with different team members focused on various tasks, from admissions management to technical support. Ensuring you’re managing your workforce efficiently is crucial for getting the most out of your human resources and delivering a consistent experience to customers.  

By leveraging workforce management (WFM) tools in your contact center, you can give your team members access to tools for staff forecasting, scheduling, and performance monitoring. These tools can help you predict the level of demand for staff members on any given day and plan appropriately so that resources are not being wasted.  

Other tools can also help streamline and improve workflows for your contact center team. These include smart IVR systems, skills-based call routing, and real-time monitoring tools that allow you to track performance and employee availability. Implementing effective workforce management tools and strategies will ensure you can optimize efficiency, reduce costs, and improve customer service, while adapting to changing demands.  

9. Foster a Student-Centric Culture 

Many of the best companies in the world earn their customers’ loyalty and elevate their brand’s reputation simply by putting their customers at the heart of their culture. Adopting a student-centric culture is one of the ways you can drive better results for your higher education contact center. 

Nurturing a student-centric culture means putting the experience of your students at the heart of everything you do. You’ll constantly look for ways to eliminate common pain points in the student journey, help them achieve their goals, and deliver personalized experiences.  

Unify your team around the commitment to putting students first by rewarding positive behavior, such as showing emotional intelligence in conversations or earning high customer satisfaction scores. You can even use gamification tools to empower your contact center agents and let them track their own progress with real-time dashboards.   

10. Collect Student Feedback and Improve 

Finally, the best way to ensure you’re delivering the best possible experience to your students, staff, and alumni, is to speak to them directly. Your contact center’s reporting tools can give you some useful data, but distributing surveys and directly requesting feedback from community members will provide you with much better insights on how to improve.   

Consider implementing automated surveys into your contact center, such as post-call surveys or email forms. Use the feedback you gather from your students for insights into where you can improve. For example, by introducing new channels for communication, eliminating friction points, or improving the skills and training of your team members. 

Remember to listen to the feedback of your employees too. Often, the experience they get from being on the front line of your contact center can help them pinpoint unique opportunities for improvement.  

Optimize Your Higher Education Contact Center with ComputerTalk 

A higher education contact center can be a fast-paced and diverse environment, brimming with both opportunities and challenges. But they’re also the key to ensuring you can develop stronger relationships with your students and staff, and ultimately strengthen the reputation of your school.   

By following the best practices listed above and implementing the right contact center technology, you can give yourself an edge over the competition in today’s higher education landscape. 

Contact us to find out how we can equip your contact center with the technology it needs to deliver exceptional experiences within your community.

Alternatively, check out our customer success stories for insights into how ComputerTalk is helping colleges and universities across North America.