What you need to know:

• WSU has successfully chalked up 80+ per cent satisfaction, 30-minute productivity gains, and 90 per cent improvements in voice abandonment rates in its call centre after embarking on a tech and business outcomes-led program across its 12 call centres servicing 1m annual callers.
• The Genesys deployment is one of seven large ecosystem renewals, each with a business focus but underpinned by a need to replace or redesign technology platforms.
• As well as improving cross-channel communications management and measurement, the program has also served as one of several AI projects delivering the scale needed to create new and better services to students plus SMEs and startups WSU supports via its Launchpad program.
• With personalisation a strategic focus and ambition across the tertiary education provider, WSU is also using AI and the power of its new communications platform to begin personalising engagements with its 47,000 students, starting with those using its tutorial assistance program.

WSU’s chief information and digital officer, Scott Synder, joined the tertiary education provider just as it was commencing a digital transformation program backed by significant funding and a top-down imperative to drive change. The approach is to tackle seven large ecosystem renewals, each with a business focus but underpinned by a need to replace or redesign technology platforms. 
The first of these was contact centre operations, which were sitting on an aging 20-year-old phone system. WSU gets 1 million calls a year into its 12 standalone call centres, the largest of which manages student enquiries accounting for 70 per cent of volume. WSU boasts more than 47,000 students and is ranked in the top 250 universities globally. 
“We’d answer the phone and speak politely, then hang up,” Synder tells Mi3. “The ecosystem ambition for the contact centre was about how we manage those calls and get something better out of them first. Then from a longer-term perspective, as we move towards a personalisation agenda, how do we use those communication channels managed through Genesys, which is doing more than just answering the phone and doing email, to move towards personalisation.” 

As Synder explains it, the problem was “a little bit technology and a lot about business”. “The beauty of this particular project, which is being run by a fantastic project team, and excellent change person, is the student area really got excited about the projects once they could see where this was going, and they understood what the platform was capable of doing. That’s what you hope for,” he says. 

WSU picked Genesys’ communications management platform on the basis that it’s arguably the best in the world with what it does, according to Synder. Within a handful of months last year, the telephone and email systems were upgraded across all 12 locations. 

“Once we had a base program, working with Genesys and the project management team, we began to say now that we have bought this and bought every option you could possibly buy with it, what else could we actually do with this,” he says. 

An early additive use case was improving overseas audience and overseas student inquiries and engagement. Many of these individuals are more comfortable conversing via WhatsApp than calling via a mobile phone, so bringing in WhatsApp as a managed channel was quickly realised. Agents facilitated more than 570,000 interactions on new WhatsApp and SMS channels in 2023 with a significant increase expected in 2024.  

Then there are the language and translation capabilities now on offer. Genesys’ platform can flip into different languages at the drop of the hat – a useful function for a multicultural university. 

“It'll recognise your IP and then ask if you’d like to switch to Nepalese for example. You'll end up running multiple screens where the student is speaking in their native language, it’s interpreting and the agents responding back in English and it's interpreting it back,” Snyder says. “The back-office screen of Genesys doing its stuff with the different filters and the agent assist and quantifying whether that was negative or positive is really something to watch.”

Another big leap forward was taking several thousand knowledge articles, integrating them, then using AI capabilities to serve up real-time insights to agents in the call centre as well as students on external-facing websites via a bot.  

“The extensibility of the product and ability to – I know it's a buzzword – tackle ‘experience orchestration’, which is part and parcel of where we wanted to move to with the personalisation agenda, was all there,” says Snyder. 

In addition, sensitivity conversation filters enable WSU to check students who ring its helpdesk for academic tutorial assistance and measure whether assistance is really working or not, and gauge if they’re satisfied or not based on voice analysis. An employee benefit meanwhile is WSU’s dozen call centres connecting not just through technology, but organically via an education exchange. 

“Given our biggest centre has the greatest use of the broadest functionality, the other call centres are now asking them to teach them how to do these things as I'd really like to bring that in. There’s an organic community growing right there,” says Snyder.  

Currently, WSU is over 80 per cent satisfaction rates for the experience of the centres. “I couldn’t tell you what it was before Genesys because I couldn't tell you. That number will continue to improve,” Snyder says.  

AI and personalisation play

Synder’s team is now focused on several extension projects. One pilot is with the University's startup and SME support group, Launchpad, which services the Western Sydney Startup Community.

“Rather than putting knowledge articles into the AI based on student types of questions, we're putting in the support material for the SMEs and startups,” Snyder explains. “The SMEs and startup community can now go to the Launchpad site and use the bot in the same way. And they can get a response as opposed to what has existed in the past, where there just hasn’t been enough capacity in Launchpad to meet demand.”

The ‘Western success’ project (where students ring up for tutorial support) was originally in the scope of original changes but it’s also growing legs under the broader strategic plan of embracing personalisation at WSU.  

“Apart from paying attention that it was Fred the student that rang you, you couldn't do much more,” Snyder says. “At the end of last year, we were able to take the satisfaction scores off the interaction of the people who called, pair that back with attendance statistics and other grade statistics, and begin to form a map as to who is at risk of failing out of uni and what we can do about it.

“Unis have been trying to do that for years, but you rely very much on whether the person interacted with the uni. We can now say, did they interact and were they satisfied with that interaction? Did they get something out of it? And it's not a university staff member’s subjective assessment, it’s the AI functionality doing that in bulk.”

As a university, WSU is subject to Commonwealth Legislative requirements demonstrating it is providing acceptable levels of support to students.

“Having something you can quantify is quite helpful,” Snyder continues. “Typically, because of policy and other reasons, unis are very good at trying to help people who are about to fail, and people who are super good we want to recruit for PHDs. But everybody else in the middle bumbles along at their own pace. If you're like us with nearly 50,000 students, you're never going to be able to set up a call centre resource to talk to that many people to see how they're going and trying to come up with a personal experience.

“But if you have capability to a large extent that’s automated and AI driven… you don't have to wait until they're in serious academic trouble before they become apparent. That’s where we would like to expand it to - our ability to personalise to 50,000 students as opposed to assisting either really good or in trouble.”

At the same time, another one of WSU’s seven ecosystem projects focuses on refreshing the underlying information infrastructure of the university based on a new design to enable personalisation, AI and more.

“What the uni is looking for is a personalisation capability you can apply to a whole range of situations. The basic things about having attributes about the person, being able to generate a scenario then being able to interact with them applies to anything,” Snyder says.

WSU has a broader program of AI pilots running right now, each with a different vendor. These include IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Ernst & Young. As a tertiary education provider, it’s also subject to the Federal Government’s request all universities have AI usage policies by the end of this year.

“Getting ready to do AI at a whole-of-institutional level is really interesting. You tend to have to do multiple things at the same time which slows down things to a degree as the uni goes through, the question of ‘what is responsible use?’” Snyder comments. “What does safe look like, who should be checking for cybersecurity concerns? Because it's so new and so new for the uni, there are an awful lot of checks and balances. With most of the AI things we’re doing, nobody will want to let them go once they're piloted, but I think we'll probably group up towards the end of the year.

“We'll see what we learned out of the whole lot then go forward.”

Getting buy-in for tech-led change

For Snyder, what the call centre project has done for the University is demonstrate it can do work underpinned by technology that leads to substantial positive change.

“With the seven ecosystems we chose, things like the information infrastructure are fundamental, while some of them are a little bit more targeted – for example, around how the curriculum is managed. These all have significant business change behind them, and different information and AI applied to it,” he explains. “As the senior executive and board see we’re not just throwing money away on technology toys, that this actually works and we're doing okay things, they take the investment more seriously.”

According to Synder, WSU has built itself into one of the most successful unis in Australia over the last 10 years off the back of its campus football rather than an IT environment.

“There is a view now that investment needs to be rebalanced a little bit to bring in an IT side. This will lead to other projects that are broader in scope than what we've done so far,” Snyder says. And having won an award from Genesys for the work it’s done so far pushing innovation using the vendor’s platform, there’s even more confidence in the exec team it’s on the right track.

On the personalisation agenda now is what else can be done in terms of improving real-time interaction with people.

“How often can we generate a scenario for a person that's unique to their circumstances? And how quickly can we do to the satisfaction of the user? Those are the next targets,” Snyder says.

There’s still more operational and productivity work to be done as well. On the to-do list is investigating WSU’s 12 call centres and whether it needs all of them, as well as how integrated they can be.

“It'd be nice to see the general stats improve as people get used to using the Genesys functionality,” Snyder concludes. “This is all new for the agents: Having AI capabilities that say hang on a sec, that caller wasn’t happy with that answer, that's a red, maybe you'd like to reconsider his five options – you’ve got to do that on the fly while trying to talk to the student. You’d think that whole process is going to get better over time.”