Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Telecommunications
Can a Dedicated Call Center Boost Enrollment?
1/24/2008
When a prospective student phones a college for information, answering questions quickly might mean the difference between enrolling that student and having that student decide to go elsewhere.A project rolled out in 2006 at Montgomery County Community College in Philadelphia, PA, addressed the importance of those sorts of calls with a new call center located on one of the college's two campuses. With the new call center and new technology for running and monitoring it, the college now answers 80 percent of its calls with 30 seconds, dong so with just two full-time staff members. And administrators believe that, among other things, this has contributed to the biggest enrollment numbers ever at MCCC.
Before the new system was installed, MCCC's administration was often inundated with phone calls, especially during peak times such as spring and fall registration. Last year, the college received perhaps 55,000 calls to admissions and registration; on a single day during a peak period, 800 calls might come in. If lines were busy, many of the calls went to the voice mail system, leaving a huge volume of calls waiting to be returned. Faced with hundreds of calls to return, staff often found it difficult to reach students, resulting in endless calls back and forth.
"During peak periods, there could be a backlog of 30 or 50 or 100 calls," according to Celeste Schwartz, VP of IT at MCCC. "To redial all of those and actually get [a student] on the phone ... you could be playing telephone tag for days."
Because of that, students complained regularly about either calling and having no one answer or leaving a message and not hearing back in a timely fashion. With the new system in place, Schwartz said, those complaints have virtually disappeared.
Not only that, but enrollment is up significantly, according to Schwartz. And while the new call center isn't the only reason, she said, "certainly, when you can answer a prospective [student's] questions instantly, as opposed to it going into a voice mail box where they might not hear back from someone for a few days,... maybe by then they've [chosen] another college."
With campuses in Blue Bell and Pottstown, MCCC serves some 24,000 students in the Philadelphia area. In order to enhance student retention and attract new students, student affairs and the IT administration worked closely together to plan, design and implement the new call center. The call center is part of a larger "Student Success Center" that serves walk-in student traffic with such services as registration and financial aid in a single location.
One goal of the new call system, according to Call Center Manager Barbara Lefevre, was to eliminate or reduce to practically nothing those time-consuming voice mail messages. "We wanted to be there when the student called us [the first time]," she said. That goal has been accomplished, as has another: To free up staff members working in the Student Success Center for face-to-face work with walk-in students, without the phone interruptions that used to be common.
Recommended Reading
- Fixed-Mobile Convergence: Dartmouth Beefs Up Cell Coverage, Cuts Costs
Problems with cell phone coverage aren't uncommon on college campuses. There are two main reasons: The beefy structure of historic buildings can block cellular reception within walls, and, on more remote campuses outside cities, signal coverage can be light.
- Thompson Rivers U Deploys Unified Digital Campus for ERP
Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in British Columbia has selected SunGard Higher Education's Banner Unified Digital Campus (UDC) to integrate its ERP systems.
- DV Kitchen Web Video Publishing System Released
DVcreators.net has released DV Kitchen, a new video encoding and publishing application for Mac OS X designed specifically for creating materials to be posted on the Web.
- NEC Debuts 4 Education Projectors
NEC this week debuted four new projectors targeted toward education applications, along with a new MultiSync LCD display. The new NP-series projectors are entry-level models started at $899 but are designed to provide high light output, support for closed captioning, and built-in networking capabilities.
- Security Researchers Uncover Spring Framework Vulnerability
Software frameworks are enjoying enormous popularity these days among a range of developers. It's popularity well earned; frameworks provide powerful tools for building more flexible and less error-prone applications. They generally enhance developer productivity with out-of-the-box functionality. And they can free developers to focus on features instead of common coding tasks.
- 3PAR Server Arrays Integrate Fat-to-Thin Processing
Utility storage provider 3PAR has announced the release of the 3PAR InServ T400 and T800 Storage Servers. The new hardware is built on the company's third-generation InSpire architecture, featuring the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC with integrated fat-to-thin processing.
