News

UC Riverside Chats Up Prospective Students

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/04/10

The University of California, Riverside has selected Intelliworks Chat to provide a mechanism for admissions representatives to engage in a live chat with prospects and capture those interactions in the Intelliworks relationship management application. The university has been using the latter since fall 2008. Chat, a Web-based service, was introduced by the company in July 2009.

"We chose Intelliworks Chat as a way to improve our students' satisfaction by decreasing response time and cutting down on e-mail backlog," said Emily Engelschall, director of recruitment at UC Riverside. "We launched Chat during a busy time of year, when students are working to get their applications in on time. In just the past few weeks, more and more prospects are using this as a way to get their questions answered quickly."

The university is using current students who work in the admissions department to help staff the chat after normal business hours. This allows prospects to be able to reach a representative at the hours they are most likely to be working on their applications.

The chat program allows users to:

• Manage multiple agent queues and transfer chats across multiple departments;
• Identify visitors by region;
• See previous chats with returning visitors;
• Assign inbound chats to representatives;
• Direct prospects to Web pages through a 'page push' feature;
• Attach chat transcripts to the contact's record in the CRM;
• Integrate chat statistics with Google Analytics; and
• Access the agent console via a Web browser or through a desktop client that's optional.