Case Study: Ânima Educação

Ânima Educação is the third-largest private higher education institution in Brazil by student population, serving approximately 400,000 students across 18 institutions that span undergraduate, postgraduate, distance learning, and the Inspirali medical postgraduate group. Between 2021 and 2025, enrollment nearly tripled through a sustained acquisition pattern, and the student support operation that had been stitched together brand by brand no longer matched the scale it had to serve. By rebuilding student support on a unified NiCE CXone platform and bringing it live in time for Brazil’s post-ENEM enrollment rush, Ânima cut commercial wait times from five hours to five minutes during the two-week window that drives roughly 70 percent of its annual revenue.

01 BEFORE

A student support operation that grew faster than it could be unified

Ânima Educação is one of the three largest private higher education institutions in Brazil by student population, serving approximately 400,000 students across 18 institutions that range from undergraduate programs and distance learning to the Inspirali. medical postgraduate group. Its mission is to broaden access to higher education across one of the most geographically dispersed countries in the Americas, from the north of Brazil to the south

That mission has driven more than a decade of growth through acquisition. Between 2021 and 2025, the student body grew from roughly 150,000 to more than 400,000, and Ânima’s rank among Brazilian private universities moved from fifth to third. Each institution that joined the group brought its own combination of ticketing tools, voice systems, and channel-specific workflows.

The result was a student support operation assembled faster than it could be unified. A single student could reach Ânima on WhatsApp, voice, video, and email and meet a different system, a different agent, and sometimes a different answer at each door.

Vanessa Takaoka, Director of Technology at Ânima Educação, joined the group in 2021 after a career in Brazilian telecommunications and brought an outside lens to a pattern she saw repeated across the education sector: the default had long been to build proprietary tools for every new need rather than adopt mature market platforms. “The main problem was that the systems were built with silos instead of integration,” she said. “People buy systems that solve a specific problem, and then the process depends on a sheet and on the people using it.”

The example Ânima cites most often is student reimbursements. Students owed money by Ânima were waiting three months for payment to clear. When the same request routed through a colleague who knew directly which department owned the fix, the reimbursement resolved in two minutes. The gap between three months and two minutes was not a technology failure. It was the absence of a platform that let an agent see the full student picture at first contact.

The dysfunction sharpened at peak enrollment. Brazil’s post-ENEM window, the two-week period each year when the government publishes high school exam scores and students apply en masse to private universities, drives approximately 70 percent of Ânima’s annual revenue. It is the institution’s Black Friday. In 2025, the average commercial response time during that window was five hours.

02 DESIRE TO CHANGE

Student pressure as the forcing function

Ânima’s leadership did not need a market signal to move. The pressure came from students and their families directly. A student who applied during the post-ENEM window and did not receive a timely response would apply to a competitor instead. Retention economics and acquisition economics converged on the same channel.

“Honestly, the pressure was the students, our main customer,” said Takaoka. “If the student and the parents of the student don’t have a good experience with us, it reflects directly on the investment and on churn.”

The question was not whether to modernize student support. It was whether Ânima had the conviction to rebuild its busiest system during its busiest period.

03 NiCE SOLUTION

A full-scope rebuild timed to the enrollment cycle

Ânima chose to transform student support across every program type at once, covering undergraduate, postgraduate, distance learning, the Inspirali medical postgraduate group, and specialized programs, rather than piloting in one brand and expanding from there. The scope was a strategic bet. A phased, brand-by-brand rollout would have replicated the silo problem inside the new platform.

The selection of NiCE CXone was framed by a conviction about where Ânima’s expertise ends. “Our core business is education,” said Takaoka. “Software about education is our proprietary knowledge. But customer experience is not our knowledge. We need a platform that brings the best brain in that segment. It’s possible to accelerate the transformation ten times.

The rebuild unified voice, WhatsApp, email, video, and chatbot interactions on a single platform and gave agents a 360° view of each student at first contact. Chatbot-to-agent handoffs carried full context across channels, so a student who started a request on WhatsApp and escalated to a live agent did not restart the conversation. Real-time queue management replaced the manual routing that had cracked during enrollment peaks. More than 300 people across operations, brand teams, and technology were involved in the implementation.”

The timing was the risk. Ânima’s implementation completed in December 2025, and the full operation ran on NiCE CXone from January 2026, which is the opening of the post-ENEM enrollment window. The cut-over landed inside the period responsible for the majority of Ânima’s annual revenue. Ânima’s CTO captured the moment afterward. “You are courageous, you are brave, because it’s not easy to change the airplane during the flight,” he said. The line has become the defining story of the project inside Ânima: a rebuild that did not allow for the comfort of a quiet cut-over.

“The first step is to understand the main problem directly with the customer. In our case, the customer is the student. Put yourself in the student’s position. Then recognize where your own expertise ends. Our core business is education. Customer experience is not our knowledge. A market platform that brings the best brain in that segment can accelerate your transformation ten times.”

Vanessa Takaoka

Director of Technology,
Ânima Educação

04 RESULTS

Five hours becomes five minutes

The first post-ENEM enrollment window under the new platform produced the headline metric. Average commercial wait time during peak enrollment moved from five hours in 2025 to five minutes in 2026. For a two-week period in which website sessions cross 15 million and the majority of annual revenue is at stake, that shift was not incremental. It was categorical.

Student-facing improvements extended across channels. WhatsApp response time dropped by roughly 75 percent, with nearly all student requests resolved the same day. Service level across the operation rose by 40 percentage points. Transfer efficiency, the measure of how often a student reaches the correct department on the first attempt, rose by 28 percentage points. Customer satisfaction moved ten percentage points in Top-2-Box across undergraduate, postgraduate, and retention flows, with satisfaction ratings approaching five stars in key student segments. Average handle time fell by approximately 20 percent as agents stopped re-collecting information already captured in other channels.

Financial outcomes followed. WhatsApp messaging costs fell by roughly half as Ânima consolidated what had previously been a set of disparate channel contracts onto a single platform. Ânima also reports multimillion-real annual savings tied to the consolidation of platforms that had been maintained in parallel.

The cultural return may matter more than the operational one. Inside Ânima, the implementation has become the internal reference project for change management at scale. “We were capable. I didn’t believe it myself,” said Takaoka, reflecting on the team that delivered the cut-over.

05 FUTURE

From reactive to proactive, and the next layer of AI

With the platform stable and the first peak enrollment cycle behind it, Ânima’s roadmap extends NiCE CXone into the student experience in two directions. The first is proactive engagement, using platform data to notify students about class schedule changes, faculty substitutions, or administrative delays before the student has to ask. “We want to go from reactive attending to proactive attending,” said Takaoka. “We inform the student before they realize they have a problem.”

The second direction is AI. Ânima has already deployed NiCE Bot Builder for lead qualification during enrollment, with early conversion results Ânima characterizes as promising. The roadmap extends further into conversational AI through Cognigy as a next phase.

The cultural shift underneath both directions is the one Ânima considers hardest to build and most valuable. Customer experience is a discipline higher education has not typically built in-house. “We used to have the academic mindset, not the student experience mindset,” said Takaoka. “The platform helped us build a new vision around digital experience. It is a new competence.”