Managing a distance education program with 100 000 students countrywide is no easy task in itself, but handling all the students` telephonic enquiries has the potential of becoming a veritable nightmare. This scenario very nearly overwhelmed National Private Colleges (NPC) until it called in expert outside help in the form of eContact Solutions to assist in establishing its own fully functional call centre solution.
NPC is part of the National Education group, a wholly owned Naspers subsidiary, which is currently i n the process of merging with Educor. The company runs three brand names - Lyceum, Success, Mentor Business School.
Lyceum courses are directed at people already in a career and who want to advance further, while Success is aimed at newcomers to the career market. Mentor concentrates on business courses, management, public administration, marketing management and the services industries.
"We were being overwhelmed by telephone calls," says James Durand, IT manager at NPC. "The calls were coming in at random locations at our head office in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, and we had no way of knowing who was saying what or if there was any central co-ordination.
"We were also being criticised in terms of our delivery and, as we had no way of managing or measuring what was being said to any particular student, the system was under serious strain," Durand says.
"It was then that we decided to set up a call centre and turned to eContact Solutions for help," Durand adds.
The help NPC received came in the form of a complete solution which included consulting and the Quintus software package. "The service was excellent," says Durand. "They came in, scoped the size of the project and made an accurate assessment of what we needed.
"Their assessment tied up perfectly with our own internal expectations. It was exceptional value for money as the advice from eContact Solutions was virtually priceless. We had no frame of reference, no previous experience in this field whatsoever, and they were able to utilise what was obviously detailed knowledge in this area to show us the correct path," Durand continues.
Quintus was selected as the primary call-logging package because it integrated well with NPC`s existing back-office and workflow applications. "If a query comes in which the operator cannot fulfil, a workflow process is initiated automatically," explains Durand. "Apart from this, we now have a complete record of all the interactions with the students and can measure things such as time agents took to answer, the time they took in dealing with the query, dropped calls, and a whole range of other linked call centre activities."
"We also chose Quintus because of its rapid deployment," Durand notes. "It is a quick out-of-the-box solution, with the NPC implementation completed in only two months without requiring onsite consultants taking hundreds of expensive hours setting-up the system."
Quintus`s strong Web functionality was also critical to NPC`s future plans. "The technology is there to expand the call centre to the Web, which forms part of our company`s vision," explains Durand. "We intend to allow students to log enquiries directly onto our website in the near future."
The system was launched this year with 14 operators split into two teams of five and nine agents each. The five-person team is mostly used for inbound sales, while the others are used as a service centre for the students.
Typical student inquires encompass account queries, exam location requests and other student specific administration details.
"There are tangible benefits for us and the students," says Durand. "We now have a measurement in terms of our interaction with students. We can use this to pinpoint problems and identify new needs according to the reports we can draw from the system. The students also have welcomed the one-stop central point of contact as it makes their lives much easier."
Share