Western Sydney University achieves 65 percent reduction in average call response time

Western Sydney University (WSU) has managed to reduce average call response time by 65 percent plus win back 30 minutes per day for its agents.

The university overhauled its student engagement hub through AI and digital solutions including using Genesys partner Nexon and WhatsApp messaging platform, AI bots for better self-service and AI-driven insights for improved decision-making.

Sami Beydoun, team leader for the student services hub, Western Sydney University told a Genesys Xperience Sydney audience the university also saw a 90 percent drop-in abandonment rate.

“In the realm of service offering overall, previously we had quite a few problems with abandon rate. The other issue we had was just unreliable platforms that couldn't take high stress, high volume situations.

He said the implementation of Genesys provided a “solution to that problem”.

“We can see a 65 percent reduction in the average speed of answer in 2023 when compared to 2022.

“Where we have CSAT measures [customer satisfaction score] and post interaction surveys in place which allow us to measure experiences and ultimately empower our students to tell us what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong,” Beydoun said.

He said some customer satisfaction scores have shown “a 90 percent overall positive score”

“What I like about the platform is that we're able to hone in on the 10 percent of interactions that didn't score so well and start to think about what the actual drivers of those negative outcomes are.

“We simply didn't have that before.”

Beydoun explained the 90 percent dip in abandonment rate and other notable results “has to do with having this reliable cloud-based platform.”

He said under the new system students can access the hub more reliably and more logically.

“Whereas in the past, we might have seen system crashes and other things that created a full downtime of that support in the first place.”

Beydoun added employees are saving about 30 minutes per day for agents "due to the elimination of switching between different platforms to work on different channels”.

“I've also noticed that the employees are taken into their own hands to use features like two-way SMS during the phone call interactions to deliver information that they otherwise would have had to send in an email after the call.

“It's ultimately streamlining the delivery of knowledge and the chatbots and the knowledge optimiser tools within Genesys are ultimately allowing us to think about our knowledge base, how we set it up, how we deliver information, does it speak the student's language so that we can ensure the chatbot does indeed fulfil its purpose,” Beydoun said.