Multi-Campus Secondary Education System Customer Service Center serving over 100,000 students a year.
Multi-Campus Call Center needed help meeting the needs of students, marketing, finance and administrative support. Used GCS Consulting to boost performance and relevancy in their organization.
The Challenges
- Balancing Cross-functional demands on the contact center from various departments for recruiting, retention, campus communication, counseling, collections, web support and more.
- Meeting annual goals and objectives for performance and cost containment.
- Needing call center expertise to improve recruiting and hiring, workflow, skill assignment, and reporting.
- Wanting a peer review to understand where they stood and to use in support of requests for resources
The Solution
The College invited GCS in for a 90-day evaluation, consultation and implementation plan. The GCS team included subject matter experts in each key to uncover areas of opportunity and provide implementation plans and key performance metrics for sustaining efficiency over time.
Externally, GCS reached out to the peer network to identify areas of excellence and areas of unmet needs. They conducted over 90 interviews nationwide, of colleges and universities to document and compare call center activities for communicating with potential and existing students. This peer review was presented to the client for help in decision making, goal setting and resource requests.
Conducted an 18-month long selection process to find a new firm to run its CSC. In its Request for Proposal, Agency clearly outlined its expectations for
- Improved Service Levels
- High Customer Satisfaction and
- Strict Budget Adherence.
After reviewing proposals from a dozen companies, the Agency selected GCS to turn around its struggling CSC.
The Results
Implementation of the GCS recommendations increased the number of meaningful call center interactions with students and prospects by over 30% annually. A focus on increasing meaningful interactions led to an increase in Applications, Enrollment, Retention and Completions, the key goals of the organization.
- Detailed implementation plan for all recommendations with ROI support.
- Reorganization into teams to better match customer needs with functional expertise.
- Workforce Management plan to balance FTE levels to meet SLAs throughout the day and increase contact time with prospects and students.
- Shifting of non-value added functions from live CCR agents to self-service technology.
- Specification, review, and implementation of new call center suite of technologies including ACD, IVR and robust call recording.
- Implement additional customer contact channels in the call center including chat, SMS text and social media communication methods.
- Selection of a new call center manager with the needed skill and experience.
- Better methods to track the success of marketing campaigns to demonstrate the using call center statistics that indicate call volume associated with specific campaigns.
GCS understands Contact Center Operations
The GCS Consulting team has grown up in the contact center space. They have overseen the startup and operations of over 75 sites around the world and personally managed thousands of programs and campaigns on behalf of their Fortune 500 clients.
This experience allows us to provide real solutions to improve your center operations, provide meaningful training, and offer a real return on investment for their input and guidance.
