Universities Turn to 8×8 to Modernise Comms for Gen Z and Beyond

Flexible platform enables university call centres to pivot to student welfare and other formats

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Universities Turn to 8x8 to Modernise Comms for Gen Z and Beyond
Unified CommunicationsInsights

Published: January 4, 2023

George Malim

The education sector was among the most heavily impacted by the pandemic and is still, in many ways, finding its balance again. Higher education institutions faced students that didn’t complete school educations in the normal way, the interruptions of lockdowns and a steep fall in registrations from lucrative overseas students.

While the immediate response was to turn to technology to enable courses for students and facilitate lectures, tutorial groups and feedback from professors, utilisation of off-the-shelf apps from the web giants has had limitations in terms of providing the rich university experiences that students want. This means universities and other institutions are looking not only at how to make the best of tools moving forward but also what students and staff actually need from those tools.

Joe Murphy, Sales Director, 8x8

“A lot of students arrived at university and found they weren’t receiving the experiences they expected or, in some cases, needed,” says Joe Murphy, the Sales Director for Public Sector at 8×8. “There has been a mindshift at universities because of this and they are looking to attract the best students while providing an improved level of welfare and support.”

Key to this is maximising the use of technologies universities already have in place. Murphy points out that universities are well-experienced in running large contact centres to handle the admissions clearing process on a seasonal basis but then don’t use this capability for the rest of the year.

Universities are starting to better utilise their contact centre investments all year round while also supporting student welfare initiatives. Additionally, for 8×8, it’s about working with existing tools where possible.

This is good news for the vast amount of universities that have adopted Microsoft Teams as their primary collaboration platform, as 8×8 was among the first to achieve Contact Centre certified status for Microsoft Teams. This enables the routing of calls directly to Teams-powered users, improving the student experience and supporting omnichannel interactions, call recording and more.

“A number of UK universities have used our technology to help mitigate issues for students that go beyond learning,” Murphy explains. “Students and their parents are increasingly assessing welfare alongside educational performance and it makes a university more attractive if it has strong student health and wellbeing capabilities and resources in place.”

“We’re providing layers of security and support and addressing the early stages of the first semester where students are settling in after a very unusual two years of pandemic,” Murphy adds. “8×8 can really address and support that transformation in student welfare.”

Cloud communications capabilities can therefore have a dual role. First in making the university easier to interact with and thereby making it more attractive for students, and second in ensuring student experiences are richer by enabling them to communicate in the ways they prefer.

“Generation Z prefers using digital channels so universities need to enable non-voice communications as well,” says Murphy. “Universities also gain substantial revenue from foreign students so we’ve enabled web transcription so students from China or India, for example, can chat in their native language with professors. There’s no need for expensive translators because you can now target the students you want to attract.”

At the heart of this is the flexibility of the 8×8 offering that enables a large-scale contact centre during the clearing period that can be scaled down and re-purposed for student welfare and other services. The flexibility to scale up and down as demand shifts is essential to universities who can’t afford to keep the same level of call centre resource year-round.

“We have a unique offering in terms of the single platform we can provide,” says Murphy. “It enables universities to address the generational shift and bring together everyone from students, staff, lecturers and academics to Gen z and millennials to Gen X and boomers that want to communicate in a centralised way. Our platform enables universities to provide higher levels of student welfare and support and try new channels. We’ve listened to what universities want, we understand the modern challenges they face and the historical problems they have had in their communications infrastructure and we have built our technology to address their unique needs.”

 

 

ConnectivityCustomer ExperienceEducationUC TrendsUser Experience

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