Online Education Services’ (OES) was looking for a world-class software solution to support timely student engagement and growth in online enrolments. Transitioning to NiCE CXone Mpower, supported by the Optus network, let OES achieve a greater level of availability, as well as uncover valuable insights into operations and streamline workforce management to deliver exceptional student experiences.

01 Before

Improving contact center operations

With a rapidly growing student cohort, OES needed to transition to a more flexible solution that would help support students throughout their studies. OES also needed to migrate to a solution that delivered more insights into operations and deliver more comprehensive and accurate reports to university partners to ensure service agreements were delivered.

02 Desire to change

Modernizing the contact center

After using an existing contact center solution for close to four years, OES recognized it needed a new platform to meet its changing needs, including the ability to source valuable insights from the platform such as details on schedule adherence to report on standard KPIs and metrics on a daily or weekly basis, for example.

OES needed to transition to a cloud-based contact center solution that would deliver the level of redundancy and availability required and enable a remote workforce to operate seamlessly. OES reached out to its solution partner Optus, to help identify the right CX solution that would meet the organization’s needs today and into the future.

“The key responsibility of our contact center team is to take calls and support students through the exciting but daunting prospect of studying. NiCE CXone and Optus 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)

03 NiCE solution

Comprehensive analytics support for greater insights into student needs

After evaluating several potential solutions with the support of its five-year relationship with Optus, OES identified CXone Mpower as the standout cloud-based platform. One of the most appealing features of the CXone Mpower platform was the comprehensive analytics tools it offered as well as the strong workforce management features. CXone Mpower makes it simpler for OES’s teams to add and remove service experts without the need to engage IT support directly.

After initially undertaking a trial offering with the solution, which let OES test the system with 20 service experts, OES validated its decision to implement the CXone Mpower platform.

This was achieved with the support of the NiCE team and Optus as the implementation partner. From an OES perspective, both the IT and contact center teams were engaged in the rollout, which highlighted the solution’s self-service capabilities.

04 Results

Reduced outages for improved uptime

Since implementing CXone Mpower, OES has significantly reduced outages and downtime. This has helped OES to significantly improve overall availability for its partners and their students. This proved essential during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Australia when employees pivoted to a remote work environment.

CXone Mpower’s general interface and user experience was a significant improvement over OES’s incumbent platform. It is now easier for OES’s teams to navigate and manage workloads effectively. The intuitive design and layout also allow OES’s contact center service experts more clearly see who has picked up a call and track lost calls if they occur.

OES can also leverage CXone Mpower to deliver more customizable and comprehensive reporting for both its team and university partners. Since transitioning to CXone Mpower, OES has significantly increased the level of customer insight to benefit partners and executive teams. OES can now report to partners on critical KPIs and SLA metrics. “CXone Mpower has significantly improved our capacity to report on calls and agent activities,” says Christie Sutherland, Manager Student Support. “Our legacy system was very straightforward, providing little more than a basic table. CXone Mpower shows an amazing dashboard that lets you see what you want at a glance. We get so much value from it that it’s easy to forget we didn’t have it before.”

OES has achieved greater visibility into compliance metrics. OES can also dive deeper into interactions to understand student enquiries, which helps team leaders to support and coach service experts more effectively.

OES also leverages the CXone Mpower Workforce Management (WFM) capability, which allows contact center leaders to meet demand with the right people to resolve student enquires first time. WFM enables a highly flexible workforce with easy processes to swap shifts without involving managers, saving hours in administration time for team leaders.

05 Future

Expanding business use

Since deploying the NiCE platform, OES has rolled out CXone Mpower to four contact center teams. While the primary focus for the contact center has been the use of analytics and workforce management to help streamline operations, OES is also embracing omnichannel capabilities. While phone calls remain the most popular channel for both inbound and outbound inquiries, CXone Mpower makes an omnichannel environment possible for OES to build on contact center capabilities to support future state.