Imagine being able to leverage your cloud platform to build unbreakable bonds with your customers. Western Governors University (WGU) is forging strong relationships with its students, thanks to an upgrade of its contact center platform.

As an entirely online university, WGU has developed an innovative way to help more working adults gain access to higher education. With 3,000 faculty members and more than 100,000 students across 19 states, WGU removes the boundaries of time and place — enabling students find meaningful opportunities to change their lives.

Unlike conventional universities, WGU has an education model that uses a holistic care and support network with regular personal interaction. Because students are the center of everything WGU does, it wants every interaction with them to be authentic. In addition to having access to a team of course instructors, students are assigned a faculty mentor who acts as a coach and stays with them until they complete their studies.

The Advantages of Cloud

Contact center transformation is key to the unique model at WGU. That evolution began with a standard on-premises system. An upgrade to a cloud contact center with the Genesys® PureConnect™ application boosted the user experience. Finally, the next innovation — migrating to the PureCloud® application — delivered more mobility, flexibility, efficiency and microservices-hardened resilience.

The Genesys product enabled WGU to build the experiences it had always wanted. Now students can call one number and be routed straight to their mentor or instructor. Or, if a mentor isn’t available, students are routed to the next-best-placed staff member. Those calls run over the internet using the application’s Voice feature, which enables the university to improve stability and eliminates the hassle and expense of carrier voice services.

Another advantage of migrating to Genesys Cloud is that it frees WGU faculty and support staff from hardware constraints like a hard-wired VPN. This has been particularly beneficial for remote employees; the majority of the WGU workforce is remote.

Innovation With APIs

The university is now more self-sufficient in other ways, too. For example, it can execute faster by making simple configuration changes or tapping into the platform’s API layer. The APIs have also made it easier for WGU to integrate with Salesforce — something that’s important because a lot of WGU academic experience is built on top of the Salesforce CRM system. Once WGU teams aligned on the project, integration was a snap.

One of the school’s key contact centers saw an immediate improvement when it started using the workforce optimization tools as well as skills-based routing — achieving a 20% increase in its service level overnight.

Thanks to faster integration, WGU staff doesn’t waste time toggling between applications and screens. For example, they have better visibility into what’s happening with students in their queues and can use multiple tools like click-to-dial — without leaving Salesforce.

Instead of being tied to a terminal, the cloud lets supervisors walk around with iPads and sit alongside colleagues, coaching and solving problems as they occur. Staff can also work from home; all they need is an internet connection.

Other departments have seen a positive impact on service levels. Within financial services, more than 80% of calls are answered within 30 seconds, compared to around 60% before the migration. This happens through better queue monitoring and by enabling staff to switch quickly between phone and email.

Exceeding Expectations

Customer experience differentiates your brand and builds loyalty. The goal at WGU is for every student to feel that their learning experience has been specifically designed for them. And the school has taken advantage of the Genesys product to create the flexibility and innovation it needs to support staff as they make every student’s experience feel personal.

The all-in-one Genesys Cloud platform is easy to deploy and use — and it delivers the power to grow. Contact us to learn how to exceed your customers’ expectations with Genesys.