Transforming OES customer experiences for online education

As a market-leading provider of online and blended learning solutions, Online Education Services (OES) partners with universities, training institutes and professional bodies worldwide to give people a chance to transform their lives through online education. 

Providing self-service provisioning is critical to the success of their operations. Catering to students from all demographics with many questions around their journey and experience.

Optus worked closely with OES to trial the NICE CXone contact centre solution who were won over by the solution’s improved reliability and ease of use, as well as its clever dashboard providing real-time customer insights on performance, improving reporting capabilities and providing the ability to streamline workforce management.

OES wanted to transition to a contemporary cloud-based contact centre solution that would deliver better levels of redundancy, availability and help them streamline processes and simplify agent onboarding. 

When COVID-19 hit the need was even more important to enable their workforce to operate remotely. Optus was on standby to help identify a solution that would meet their immediate needs, with flexibility and scale to evolve - no matter what future challenges may arise. 

The trial of NICE CXone enabled OES to learn more about its functionality and the complementary CX Services that they had struggled to get from their previous solution. 

The dashboard capability provided an instant return with an easy and intuitive way to see performance at a glance. It became invaluable for agents as they could easily swap shifts without involving a team leader. 

The workforce management solution demonstrated efficiencies in a short period of time, it allowed team leaders hours back to focus on more strategic initiatives each day.

After initially undertaking a trial with the solution, and the support of both the Optus and NICE team, OES validated its decision to implement the Optus Cloud Contact Centre (OCCC) platform. 

The open and collaborative communications with all parties, including a monthly cadence call to ensure alignment – were something they’d not experienced previously. 

Elements of the solution devised in collaboration between Optus and Nice included:

• CXone Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
• CXone Workforce Management
• CXone Agent for Salesforce
• CXone Recording
• CXone Quality Management.

OCCC has helped reduce outages and downtime and significantly improved overall availability for its partners and their students – essential realised during the COVID-19 lockdowns when employees pivoted to working remotely.

The cloud based contact centre improved the user experience and had a simple interface for users and management, an improvement over the legacy platform. For example, contact centre service experts can more clearly see who has picked up a call and track lost calls if they occur.

Furthermore, the CXone Workforce Management (WFM) solution allows contact centre leaders to meet demand with the right people to resolve student enquiries. 

• Contact centre teams can more easily manage workflows and shifts
• More comprehensive insights into call volumes and trends – OES can now report to partners on critical KPIs and SLA metrics
• A deeper understanding of student enquiries – helping team leaders support their service experts more effectively
• Enhanced self-service capabilities responding at the pace of the customer’s needs.

“The key responsibility of our contact centre team is to take calls and support students through the exciting but daunting prospect of studying. Optus and NICE CXone help us to deliver on this responsibility to our students in terms of customer experience, as well as on our service level agreements with our key university partners.” – Leah Holmes, Head of Student Operations, Online Education Services (OES)

Since first deploying OCCC, OES has enrolled five other contact centre teams to the platform. While the primary focus has been the use of analytics and workforce management to help streamline operations, omnichannel capabilities are also being adopted. 

While phone calls remain the most popular channel – particularly for students who are new to study and want an instant response and the personal touch – OES will also be able to build on the solution’s omnichannel capabilities in the future.

To discuss how Optus can help you with Contact Centre solutions that deliver tangible business and operational outcomes, contact your Optus Account Manager or call Optus Enterprise on 1800 555 937.