Can a Dedicated Call Center Boost Enrollment?

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Can a Dedicated Call Center Boost Enrollment?

1/24/2008

By Linda L Briggs

When a prospective student phones a college for information, answering questions quickly might mean the difference between enrolling that student and having that student decide to go elsewhere.

A project rolled out in 2006 at Montgomery County Community College in Philadelphia, PA, addressed the importance of those sorts of calls with a new call center located on one of the college's two campuses. With the new call center and new technology for running and monitoring it, the college now answers 80 percent of its calls with 30 seconds, dong so with just two full-time staff members. And administrators believe that, among other things, this has contributed to the biggest enrollment numbers ever at MCCC.

Before the new system was installed, MCCC's administration was often inundated with phone calls, especially during peak times such as spring and fall registration. Last year, the college received perhaps 55,000 calls to admissions and registration; on a single day during a peak period, 800 calls might come in. If lines were busy, many of the calls went to the voice mail system, leaving a huge volume of calls waiting to be returned. Faced with hundreds of calls to return, staff often found it difficult to reach students, resulting in endless calls back and forth.

"During peak periods, there could be a backlog of 30 or 50 or 100 calls," according to Celeste Schwartz, VP of IT at MCCC. "To redial all of those and actually get [a student] on the phone ... you could be playing telephone tag for days."

Because of that, students complained regularly about either calling and having no one answer or leaving a message and not hearing back in a timely fashion. With the new system in place, Schwartz said, those complaints have virtually disappeared.

Not only that, but enrollment is up significantly, according to Schwartz. And while the new call center isn't the only reason, she said, "certainly, when you can answer a prospective [student's] questions instantly, as opposed to it going into a voice mail box where they might not hear back from someone for a few days,... maybe by then they've [chosen] another college."

With campuses in Blue Bell and Pottstown, MCCC serves some 24,000 students in the Philadelphia area. In order to enhance student retention and attract new students, student affairs and the IT administration worked closely together to plan, design and implement the new call center. The call center is part of a larger "Student Success Center" that serves walk-in student traffic with such services as registration and financial aid in a single location.

One goal of the new call system, according to Call Center Manager Barbara Lefevre, was to eliminate or reduce to practically nothing those time-consuming voice mail messages. "We wanted to be there when the student called us [the first time]," she said. That goal has been accomplished, as has another: To free up staff members working in the Student Success Center for face-to-face work with walk-in students, without the phone interruptions that used to be common.