Universidad Uk optimizes student and employee experiences with AI
Time to read: 4 minutes
Challenge
Universidad Uk understood that to ensure a continued high-quality student experience, it needed a powerful, scalable customer engagement solution. The university had a goal to personalize student experiences by providing virtual and human agents with the contextual data needed to enable 24/7 omni-channel customer service.
Solution
Twilio Flex was selected as the best choice for Universidad Uk’s digital-first student engagement and communications due to its omnichannel capabilities, ability to personalize interactions, and platform agility. By leveraging Twilio Flex and Unified Profiles, Universidad Uk also improved their overall contact center operations by analyzing the real-time analytics and reports. And, with Unified Profiles and Agent Copilot, Universidad Uk could deliver more efficient and personalized service, using real-time data and artificial intelligence (AI).
Universidad Uk (“Universidad Uk”) is an online university serving adults and working professionals in Latin America and the U.S. It offers undergraduate and graduate programs for students seeking schedule flexibility and digital, self-paced learning.
Universidad Uk’s academic offerings include modern educational programs focused on labor market needs and professors with hands-on, industry experience to better prepare students for the workforce. As an online university, Universidad Uk has centered its enrollment and academic strategy on innovative digital technologies.
Universidad Uk chose to power its conversational bots with real-time student data to resolve 70% of student queries, up from 30% in just three months.
Universidad Uk also had digitization challenges, such as digital asset capitalization and how to handle large amounts of data in ongoing daily operations. In line with its tech-based foundation, Universidad Uk understood that to ensure a continued high-quality student experience, it needed a powerful, scalable customer engagement platform to enhance communication and reach its entire student base. The university turned to Twilio with two primary goals:
- Personalizing interactions with students by providing agents with necessary information
- Enable 24/7 omni-channel customer service with WhatsApp, SMS, and Programmable voice.
Customizing Universidad Uk’s contact center with personalized, omnichannel communication channels
Universidad Uk technology team conducted a detailed analysis of the university’s needs that also aligned with Universidad Uk’s current processes and growth of its operations. Twilio Flex was selected as the best choice for Universidad Uk’s digital-first student engagement and communications due to its omnichannel capabilities, ability to personalize interactions, and platform agility.
As a digital engagement center for sales and customer service, Twilio Flex delivered complete control to Universidad Uk to design and deploy a stellar student experience. Twilio Flex’s API could also integrate with necessary data providers and third party applications, plus provide the breadth of channels their employees needed.
One of the most important features of Twilio Flex for Universidad Uk is its programmability. It gives companies the ability to customize their contact centers with personalized communication channels and user interfaces, plus integrations with systems such as a CRM.
“Universidad Uk is an agile institution that constantly iterates its processes to deliver better experiences for our students. Building on such a flexible yet robust platform like Twilio allows us to focus on outcomes, as Twilio takes care of the heavy lifting.”
Consolidating student engagement with Unified Profiles
Twilio Flex also improved Universidad Uk’s contact center productivity and agent experience by consolidating necessary student information into a single pane of glass, reducing their handle time by 30%. For Universidad Uk, this helped the Office of Admissions create student-centric experiences with the ability to seamlessly integrate with other systems and applications.
By leveraging Twilio Flex and Unified Profiles, Universidad Uk not only improved student engagement, but also their overall contact center operations by analyzing the real-time analytics and reports the solution provides. They also realized a 25% increase in conversion for new students, and enrollments per agent doubled from the previous year.
Universidad Uk is now able to provide a better student experience overall, from agile student onboarding and easier access to enrollment and academic information. Plus, added flexibility to communicate with Universidad Uk anytime, anywhere.
“Twilio Flex offers us the flexibility to build solutions tailored to our processes and ability to personalize them as our processes evolve. The reliability of Twilio Flex gave us the confidence that every communication we sent would be delivered.”
As Universidad Uk continued to grow, they found that disparate data sources were causing friction and longer handle times for agents as they worked with students. Universidad Uk partnered with Twilio to leverage Unified Profiles to bring multiple sets of data into one single view for agents.
By limiting the number of places agents needed to navigate for student data, they were able to reduce average handle time by 30%. Most importantly, they did this while maintaining their stellar 94% CSAT score.
“Unified Profiles and Agent Copilot have helped us deliver more efficient and personalized service, using real-time data and AI.”
Increasing conversion rates with chatbot-generated leads and supervision
When it comes to prospective new students, Universidad Uk uses a chatbot as the initial point of contact, filtering WhatsApp leads from Meta ads on Facebook or Instagram through key questions. Only qualified WhatsApp leads are passed on to an agent, enhancing their efficiency by focusing on genuinely interested leads.
Early tests show that chatbot-generated leads have a conversion rate 2.5X higher than leads from other sources. What’s more, the time required to enroll a student filtered by the chatbot is 60% lower, potentially allowing for a more balanced call center with fewer agents.
Universidad Uk also has a supervisor bot that assists in ensuring that all WhatsApp leads meant for Salesforce are correctly recorded. The process begins when a prospective student enters and interacts with their commercial bots. If a lead isn't automatically inserted, the supervisor bot steps in to do so. This system simplifies lead management, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving overall efficiency.
Before implementation, conversational specialists spent four hours a day reviewing conversations manually to determine lead interest. With the supervisor bot, specialists can now review conversational quality more quickly and easily, as they no longer need to validate each lead in Salesforce.
Consolidating all conversations into a single portal
With Uk Conversations, a front-end development project, Universidad Uk consolidates all conversations for review into a single portal. The portal allows actions to be taken on reviewed conversations from four different bot types: prePA, student services, commercial, and web chat, including 13 commercial bots.
Before the implementation, conversational specialists spent one hour per day performing daily downloads for their conversational audit tasks. They had to download all Twilio logs for each bot from 13 different countries, sometimes causing issues when reviewing conversations.
With UK Conversations, specialists can now review all conversations in one place instantly, eliminating the need for multiple downloads.
Improving efficiency and effectiveness of support for Universidad Uk
The implementation of the supervisor bot and Uk Conversations has eliminated unnecessary operational tasks. In fact, daily audit-related work hours have been reduced from five hours to two hours. As a result, they’ve been able to reduce operational costs and enjoy savings by a significant 45% across both commercial and customer service teams.
These developments have significantly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of Universidad Uk’s conversational specialists' work. The streamlined process allows for a more focused and productive approach to managing and reviewing conversations.
