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Focus

Think '360'

3/1/2007

By Rama Ramaswami

The Virtual, Consolidated Contact Center

Investment in advanced technology is solving constituent management issues for Segar Annamalai, CIO of Alta Colleges (CO), the parent company of Westwood College, Westwood College Online, and Redstone College and Redstone Institute. (Westwood College and its online sister institution offer two-year, four-year, and specialized programs in business, industrial design, criminal justice, health care, and technology; Redstone College and Redstone Institute are a joint institution offering hands-on vocational training for the aviation and HVAC/R industries. Altogether, the colleges comprise 20 campuses across California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, and Texas.)

When the time came to upgrade Alta’s three contact center locations—which are dedicated to assisting prospective students with the enrollment process as well as handling queries from Westwood’s online students—Annamalai chose to move from a simple PBX system to what he calls “the latest and greatest technology.” In June 2005, Alta began deploying a self-hosted version of CosmoCom’s (www.cosmocom.com) CosmoCall Universe, an enterprise IP-based unified communications solution that includes automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, computer telephony integration, predictive dialing, multimedia recording, interaction history, and administrative tools. Now students can dial a local or national toll-free phone number, send e-mail, or visit Alta’s individual college websites, and CosmoCall Universe seamlessly routes their inquiries to one of 450 admissions representatives located in any of the three physical contact centers—effectively creating a new, consolidated, virtual contact center that improves Alta’s ability to efficiently and cost-effectively guide prospective students through the admissions and campus/course selection processes. And in December 2006, the contact center was integrated with Alta’s PeopleSoft enterprise system, which the college has adapted for the higher education environment.

According to Annamalai, Alta’s technology selection was driven by a two-pronged focus: 1) general service quality, and 2) the system’s ability to meet the unique needs of university students, who usually have specific questions about transcripts, grades, exams, course selections, career counseling, etc., which are not found in any environment other than a higher ed institution. “Anyone can have the first part, but the second part is focused on the educational environment. It’s very, very specific,” notes Annamalai, adding that while a traditional ERP system does not specifically cater to the educational environment, CosmoCom’s flexibility enables student queries to be routed to the agents who can best answer each question. The software also enables administrators to measure and monitor the performance of the school’s enrollment agents, financial services representatives, and new-student advisers, as well as track a student’s progress throughout his or her time at the college.

Next-Gen Contact Management

Contact management is the buzzword at Lehigh University (PA), where Bruce Taggart, vice provost for library and technology services, was looking to better manage “direct and indirect relationships based on a contact.” His goal: a more systematic approach to staying connected; the ability to communicate with everyone who attends youth camps, alumni events, and everything in between. “We want to organize the people who contact us: people who have an interest in the university, or may have expressed an interest in our lecture series or research areas,” he says. But, without a contact management system, “Who knows where that inquiry goes next? It may never even get checked.”

Taggart believes that the solution to such contact management challenges is to connect the various databases across the university (enrollment, admissions, athletics, performing arts, alumni) with a system that “puts a few more interfaces among all of them.” This would, for example, enable the university to send a personalized letter and performing arts calendar to an alumnus who attended a research seminar or a soccer or basketball camp. Taggart explains, “Anytime we make a contact, we need to enter it into a database so we can respond intelligently.”

With this objective in mind, he chose to beta-test a forthcoming enrollment management system (scheduled to be released this year) from SunGard Higher Education. The new system is actually a module that will fit right into Lehigh’s existing SunGard Banner finance and student management systems. “Many CIOs prefer a single-vendor integrated system because support is easier,” says Taggart. “Our consensus was that an integrated system would simplify maintenance. These days, a lot of users don’t want to run separate standalone systems.”

According to Jono Smith, director of marketing for Sun- Gard HE, the new system is the result of more than two years of intensive research on enrollment management. “Our approach is a little of both CRM and ERP, tightly integrated with student records, portals, and BI tools,” he says, adding that users can customize the system for their own needs. (While it is designed for existing SunGard customers, it is built on a service-oriented architecture so that it can integrate with other applications.)

“We will have some input into the system’s functionality,” says Taggart, whose priority is to be able to personalize communications with constituents. A school can differentiate itself not only by responding to a constituent’s individual needs, but also by marketing to those needs. For example, based on prior purchase patterns, he says, “You can promote new courses and new merchandise. The system offers a marketing opportunity for the institution.”

Lehigh’s return on investment is not quantifiable, at least for now: “Strict ROI? That’s a stretch,” admits Taggart. “But the return on value is very high. We get 11,000 applications; we admit 4,000. So we want that edge to be able to get the best students and faculty.”

Rama Ramaswami is senior editor at The Economist Group, publisher of The Economist, Financial Times, and other international publications. She is based in New York City.

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