With the cost of tuition fees at an all-time high, education has become a commodity. As a result, the relationship that students have with their respective institutions is changing and there is a demand from students for higher levels of “customer service”.

This new generation of students, who has grown up with SMS, email and social media, is used to interacting in real time with their friends and family, as well as the brands that they choose to buy products and services from. The HE institutions that will excel in this competitive environment are the ones who rapidly evolve their infrastructure to reflect the multichannel reality of communications.

C3 specialises in customer engagement platforms for the HE market. The C3 platform enables institutions to engage with customers across multiple channels, and deployments typically incorporate C3’s multichannel contact centre and IVR software. Complementary applications can easily be added to the platform e.g. speech recognition, call recording, secure billing.

The platform offers advanced contact centre interaction management functionality, including sophisticated voice control, advanced self-service, proactive outbound communications, speech recognition and, importantly, multichannel functionality to support the routing, queuing, tracking and reporting of all enquiries regardless of channel.

“Contact Centres within Higher Education are usually run on an informal basis,” said John Wood, Sales and Marketing Manager. “But there are still huge opportunities within departments at every institution where contact centre technology can be used to improve the student experience in terms of streamlining administration, enhancing revenue-generating services and providing ‘burstable capacity’ during seasonal peaks and fundraising efforts.”

C3 is attending UCISA 2014 (27-28 March, the Brighton Centre) – drop by Stand 45 for a demonstration of our Customer Engagement applications or email john@c3.co.uk to arrange a demo.