Universidad Uk optimizes student and employee experiences with AI
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Challenge
Universidad Uk understood that to ensure a seamless, high-quality experience for students, it needed a robust and scalable customer engagement solution. The university’s goal was to personalize student experiences by providing virtual and human agents with the contextual data needed to enable 24/7 omnichannel customer service.
Solution
Twilio Flex was chosen as the best digital-focused option for student engagement and communication at Universidad Uk due to its omnichannel capabilities, ability to personalize interactions, and platform agility. By leveraging Twilio Flex and Unified Profiles, Universidad Uk has also improved its overall contact center operations by examining real-time analytics and reports. In addition, using Unified Profiles and Agent Copilot, Universidad Uk was able to offer a more efficient and personalized service, leveraging real-time data and artificial intelligence (AI).
Universidad Uk (“Universidad Uk”) is an online university serving adults and professionals in Latin America and the United States. It offers undergraduate and graduate programs for those who want to study online and at their own pace, with flexible schedules.
The academic programs offered by Universidad Uk include modern educational programs tailored to the needs of the job market. Furthermore, to better prepare students for the realities of the market, teachers have practical experience in the sector. As an online university, Universidad Uk has focused its enrollment and academic strategies on innovative digital technologies.
"Universidad Uk chose to feed its chatbots with real-time student data to resolve 70% of their queries, an increase from 30% in just three months."
Universidad Uk also faced digitization challenges, such as capitalizing on digital assets and utilizing large amounts of data in its daily operations. Following its tech-based approach, Universidad Uk realized it needed a robust and scalable customer engagement platform to ensure a seamless, high-quality student experience, as well as to improve communication and reach its entire student base. The university turned to Twilio for two main purposes:
- Personalize interactions with students by providing agents with the necessary information
- Enable 24/7 omnichannel customer service with WhatsApp, SMS and Programmable Voice.
Personalization of Universidad Uk’s contact center with customized omnichannel communication channels
The technology team at Universidad Uk conducted a detailed analysis of the university’s needs, which were aligned with its current processes and the growth of its operations. Twilio Flex was chosen as the best digital-focused option for student engagement and communication at Universidad Uk due to its omnichannel capabilities, ability to personalize interactions, and platform agility.
As a digital engagement center for sales and customer service, Twilio Flex gave Universidad Uk full control to design and implement an exceptional student experience. The Twilio Flex API could also be integrated with essential data providers and third-party applications, in addition to offering the variety of channels necessary for its employees.
One of the most important features of Twilio Flex for Universidad Uk is its programmability. It allows companies to customize their contact centers with personalized communication channels and user interfaces, as well as integrations with systems such as a CRM.
"Universidad Uk is an agile institution that constantly iterates its processes to deliver better experiences for our students. Building on such a flexible yet robust platform like Twilio allows us to focus on outcomes, as Twilio takes care of the heavy lifting."
Consolidating student engagement with Unified Profiles
Twilio Flex has also improved the productivity of Universidad Uk’s contact center and the agents’ experience by consolidating the necessary student information in a single interface, reducing service time by 30%. For Universidad Uk, the ability to reliably integrate other systems and applications has enabled the enrollment department to create positive experiences with student usability in mind.
By using Twilio Flex and Unified Profiles, Universidad Uk has not only improved student engagement, but also its overall contact center operations through real-time data analysis and reporting provided by the solution. There was also a 25% increase in the conversion of new students, and enrollments per agent doubled compared to the previous year.
Universidad Uk is now able to offer an improved student experience across the board, from a dynamic student onboarding process to easier access to enrollment and academic information, plus greater flexibility to communicate with Universidad Uk anytime, anywhere.
"Twilio Flex provides flexibility so that we can create tailor-made solutions for our processes and customize them as they evolve. Twilio Flex’s reliability gave us peace of mind that all communications we sent would be delivered."
As Universidad Uk continued to grow, discrepancies in data sources were found to be causing difficulties and longer response times for agents when working with students. Universidad Uk partnered with Twilio to leverage Unified Profiles and bring together multiple data sets into a single view for agents.
By limiting the number of locations agents needed to navigate to access student data, it was possible to reduce average service time by 30%. Most importantly, they did this while maintaining their exceptional CSAT score of 94%.
"Unified Profiles and Agent Copilot have helped us deliver more efficient and personalized service, using real-time data and AI."
Increased conversion rates with chatbot-generated leads and supervision
When it comes to potential new students, Universidad Uk uses a chatbot as the first touchpoint, filtering WhatsApp leads from Meta ads on Facebook or Instagram through key questions. Only qualified WhatsApp leads are passed on to an agent, increasing their efficiency by focusing on genuinely interested potential customers.
Initial tests show that leads generated by chatbots have a conversion rate 2.5 times higher than leads from other sources. Moreover, the time required to enroll a student filtered by the chatbot is 60% shorter, potentially allowing for a more balanced call center with fewer agents.
Universidad Uk also has a supervisor bot that helps ensure that all WhatsApp leads destined for Salesforce are correctly registered. The process begins when a prospective student interacts with the university’s sales bots. If a lead is not automatically classified, the supervisor bot intervenes to do so. This system simplifies lead management, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving overall efficiency.
Prior to rolling this out, conversation experts spent four hours a day manually reviewing conversations to determine lead interest. With the supervisor bot, specialists can now review the quality of conversations more quickly and easily, without having to validate each lead in Salesforce.
Enhancing Engagement with WhatsApp Business Calling
To further boost student engagement, Universidad Uk partnered with Meta Business Partner Twilio to implement WhatsApp Business Calling. This integration added a voice call option, making it easier for leads to connect with the university directly from a WhatsApp conversation. As a result, they saw a 1.5 percentage point improvement in lead reply rates, with leads from WhatsApp campaigns converting at double the rate of other sources. Iván Cantú, COO of Universidad Uk, noted, “Our lead reply rate has seen greater improvement than our other communication channels.” This feature, along with WhatsApp ads, allows prospective students to seamlessly transition from messaging to calling, speeding up the qualification process and increasing enrollment success.
Consolidation of all conversations in a single portal
With Uk Conversations, a front-end development project, Universidad Uk consolidates all conversations for review in a single portal. The portal enables actions on reviewed conversations from four different types of bots: prePA, student services, commercial, and web chat, including 13 commercial bots.
Prior to rollout, conversation experts spent an hour per day performing daily downloads for their conversation audit tasks. It was necessary to download all Twilio logs for each bot from 13 different countries, sometimes causing problems when reviewing conversations.
With UK Conversations, specialists can now review all conversations in one place instantly, eliminating the need for multiple downloads.
Improved efficiency and effectiveness of support for Universidad Uk
Implementing the supervisor bot and Uk Conversations eliminated unnecessary operational tasks. In fact, the daily hours of work related to the check were reduced from five to two hours. As a result, Universidad Uk was able to reduce operating costs and achieved significant savings of 45% in its sales and customer service teams.
These advances have significantly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of Universidad Uk’s conversation experts’ work. The streamlined process allows for a more focused and productive approach to managing and reviewing conversations.