View PDF version

Traditional and Online College Campuses

Alta College is the parent company of a group of higher education institutions that include Westwood College, Redstone College and Westwood College Online. It has over 15,000 students enrolled online and at 19 campuses in six states. Its student body is growing rapidly, especially at its popular online college. Acting as counselors, Alta’s call center agents advise students on registration, class selection, enrolment and financial aid.

Enrollment Growth Requires Higher Productivity

Rapidly growing enrollment at Alta’s facilities had been straining the ability of its 500 call center agents to adequately serve its students. Its three call centers had separate equipment and operations, with no common agent performance measurements or reporting. There was no CRM integration, so agents had to manually retrieve student information when they called. Calls could not be easily transferred among the call centers to balance loads and agent utilization. With the call center becoming the dominant student interface to Alta Colleges, there was a clear need to increase agent productivity and capacity.

The need to improve service quality and to better handle multiple communications modes was equally important to Alta Colleges. Its students, particularly those in its online college, communicated increasingly by email and web chat. Alta’s agents had to better coordinate these communications with voice calls and student account information. They also had to become more consistent in how they handled communications of all types, and in the overall delivery of customer service. Alta Colleges needed to consolidate its call centers with a new platform built on the latest technologies so that it could improve agent efficiency, provide new service capabilities, and enhance the caller experience.

Consolidating Three Call Centers into a Single Platform, Virtual Contact Center

Alta Colleges chose the CosmoCall Universe™ contact center platform to consolidate all of its call center agents and its three locations. It replaced the separate PBXs at each location with a single hardware and software platform that it self-hosts at a commercial data center. A CosmoCall Universe Voice Communication Server installed at each of its three campus-based contact center locations minimizes communications costs. All system components, including the central CosmoCall Universe platform and the local point of presence equipment, are fully redundant to insure uninterrupted service.

The CosmoCall Universe contact center provides Alta Colleges with major new capabilities. It includes an integration with their Campus Management CRM, and calls can now be easily transferred among agents across physical locations. In addition, agents can simply “click to call” when viewing student records. With all agents and locations on a single platform, Alta Colleges now monitors agents, generates performance reports, and administers its entire customer service operation centrally, with total system visibility.

Better Service with Fewer Resources

Alta Colleges now provides higher quality customer service for its growing student body with fewer resources. As a result of improved agent efficiency, it’s able to handle higher call volume with fewer agents. New agent performance monitoring capabilities coupled with better access to student account information have improved students’ satisfaction with their call center interactions.

The CosmoCall Universe platform gives Alta Colleges more control and flexibility with its call center operations. Agent and group performance is monitored and reported in a consistent format across all locations. Supervisors at different organizational levels access reports centrally for long term planning, as well as locally for routine, daily management. As a result, they are now better equipped and more effective at managing and training agents.

With CosmoCall Universe, Alta Colleges can implement additional new customer service features as would be expected of such a progressive and innovative higher education institution. Predictive outbound dialing, additional People Soft integration, and web-chat are planned for the near future. The unified architecture of CosmoCall Universe and its XML-based integration tools make the continuous process of adding new capabilities and features fast and easy for Alta Colleges.