Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Customer Engagement Examples of Excellence podcast. This is an Engage Customer podcast. Find out more at engagecustomer.com. In this episode, our host is Charlie Skinner, the Customer Success Manager for UCL at Kerv Experience, who has been with Kerv since July 2022. Charlie talks with Ian Calkin, who has worked at UCL for over 23 years and has held various roles within the company. Ian is currently Platform Service Owner for Unified Voice.

• Charlie Skinner

  Right, hello Ian. It's great to have you here today. We're happy to have the opportunity to share some of the amazing things UCL do with a wider audience today. So to start things off, who are UCL and what do they do?

• Ian Calkin

  So University College London is a world-renowned university for its academic and its research, which you know this year alone we've been voted University of the Year by the Times and the Sunday Times Good University Guide. We're also ranked second in the UK Research Power Excellence Framework and we're also ninth in the QS World University Rankings. UCL offer a wide range of undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral degrees across a multitude of disciplines from arts, humanities, science, engineering, that's just to name a few. At UCL, we're all about disrupting thinking and this is seen in our approach to collaborate across different fields to address complex global challenges.

• Charlie Skinner

  And just in terms of its history, UCL, I know it's one of the most long-standing universities around, but can you provide any more info on just the history?

• Ian Calkin

  Yeah, so we were founded originally in 1826, so we're quite old, making it one of the oldest universities in England. And its original mission was to provide education for everyone. regardless of their background. And over the years, UCL has really been at the forefront of many educational reforms and innovations.

• Charlie Skinner

  Great, that's very interesting. And just in terms of your customer base, obviously the obvious answer here is students, but is there anyone else that sort of makes up your customer base at UCL?

• Ian Calkin

  Yeah, so we've got quite a varied mix. We've got obviously students that are with us now. We've got prospective students, those that have finished their A-levels and things and wanting to join university life. We also support UCL staff and our associated staff. And we also support externals, so people that aren't connected to UCL but do want to call in and discuss things with us.

• Charlie Skinner

  And just in terms of, I guess, the university over the last few years. Have you noticed anything, you know, have there been any big changes recently, potentially like the pandemic being one thing that could have changed how you operate?

• Ian Calkin

  Yeah, so, you know, we're constantly evolving and developing. You know, the pandemic really enhanced UCL's digital online learning capabilities. And that shift during the pandemic, you know, allowed us to reach a broader audience and provide much more flexible ways of learning for our students. Thank you. That's, you know, worldwide. We're also continuing to expand our global influence. We've invested heavily in new facilities and infrastructure, including the development of our new UCL East campus in Stratford, where we're fostering innovation and collaboration.

• Charlie Skinner

  Thanks, Ian. So just thinking about now, I guess when you started your journey with Kerv, what would you say your kind of top priority or priorities? were when it came to your customers experience.

• Ian Calkin

  When we embarked on our transformation to Genesys, we really wanted the top priority to be our customers journey and their experience. And we wanted to enhance that overall for all students and staff journeys. We wanted to improve the accessibility of the platform, have a more responsiveness to handling those inquiries, bringing on omnichannel previously we just did voice there's a real need to switch and move into the world of chat and you know social media so that was that was key to the the platform choice that we did during our procurement exercise we also had to be hugely scalable we had considerable issues previously where you know the amount of calls caused issues on our previous system we needed Genesys to be able to scale up as well as scaled scale down particularly around A-level results day, when we have a massive peak in calls and also data security. is really important to UCL. We needed a platform that was going to be compliant with our internal policies and procedures around data security. And I guess the final thing there was it had to be able to embed with our existing systems. So using things like our enterprise service management tools and customer relationship management, all of that while achieving the best value for money and the most cost-efficient system. Yeah.

• Charlie Skinner

  Okay. Yeah, no, that's brilliant. And I guess sort of linked to the previous question, but, you know, which would you say, which business outcomes have improved the most since UCL have started to work with Kerv and the Genesys platform?

• Ian Calkin

  So we've definitely seen enhanced customer satisfaction. Our users are now telling us that they really love the fact that we've got different methods of communication. The quality of the calls has improved. People have noticed that it's not as grainy as it once was. And it's also meant that we can streamline some of our operations. There's work still to be done, but we are reducing the time needed by agents on the phone. Because we're doing knowledge articles and things like that. We've obviously made some cost savings because we've switched to a cloud-based system, reducing infrastructure at UCL. And it's also improving our employees'productivity because the Genesys platform is so user-friendly. And the automation features that we're slowly rolling out have really made an impact on our staff's ability to do their jobs.

• Charlie Skinner

  That's great. That was great to hear. And I know A-Level results day went well as well, but obviously I'll touch on that in a second. So just in terms of, you know, going on to AI now, which seems to be what everyone's talking about. So. Do UCL have any ambitions to start using AI? And if you do, what are they?

• Ian Calkin

  Yeah, so AI is a big thing. It's really come a long way over the last few years. And we really want to start developing that within the Genesys platform. So we're looking at things like agent assist and using Copilot in order to help us focus and assist our real-time agent support. Allowing agents to be able to automatically be given knowledge articles and tips on how to handle the call. I guess the automated summarisation is something we're really keen to implement in that it will give us a summary of what the call was about and that can be fed into our CRM or ESM platform so that there's a permanent record that that call took place and you know any agent in the future that handles the same type of inquiry can review what was discussed. Data analytics, you know, there's loads of things that AI can help us with, with our analytics of data, looking at common issues and trends and allowing us to continuously improve the services that we offer. I think the other thing is with predictive engagement, students, prospective students looking around on our website, if we know the predictive engagement AI sees that they're possibly struggling to find the right piece of information that they're looking for, we can screen pop a chat widget and ask them if they want help. You know it brings us to their forefront and corrals them to actually engage with us quicker yeah

• Charlie Skinner

  no that's that's great great to hear i guess yeah exciting times i know we're already sort of speaking to you about the the Genesys or native AI Copilot predictive engagement so hopefully we can um assist you getting things kind of put in put in place so that's yeah exciting times um so going back to a level results day so obviously it was last the clearing period was last month um so just be interesting to hear how um the contact centre sort of coped this year um you know and did Genesys support this at all yeah absolutely so this year was a much better experience

• Ian Calkin

  My heart rate was kept down a lot more than previous years. It didn't go quite as well. The technology performed brilliantly. We also had some added reassurance by having a member of Kerv's team on site with us, just in case there were any problems. But it showed, having that member of Kerv's staff there showed our stakeholders how seriously we took A-level results day as well. The platform held up we could see that it automatically scaled up. We saw extra edge devices appear in the admin portal allowing us to have that reassurance that it sensed that we were suddenly giving it a massive load of traffic. And it did the right thing. We were constantly monitoring it throughout the day with real-time analytics and passing on to the supervisors for the A-level results day where any pain points were, where queues were getting a little bit busier than others. We also offered web messaging this year, and that went extremely well as well. We implemented canned responses and we had students giving information during the initial queuing stage, which that information was passed directly on to the agent as they answered the message. So, no, it was an absolutely brilliant experience this year.

• Charlie Skinner

  Yeah, that's fantastic. And hopefully it's sort of given the wider business some confidence in the new platform for next year as well. So, and yeah, with web messenger, I think there's a real opportunity there to sort of expand, you know, how much is being utilised on A-level results day. So we can, yeah, definitely assist there. Okay. So just moving on to the next question now, and it's quite an interesting one. So how do you define customer experience? Would you say it's a journey, a moment or something else entirely?

• Ian Calkin

  Well, I think it's a bit of all of those things really, isn't it, Charlie? It's a continuation of improvement for our users'journeys to give them the best experience possible. but it's the specific moments within a journey that can set UCL apart from other providers. It's those moments during the interaction that make the students form a lasting impression of how well UCL dealt with their inquiry and all journeys or moments are constantly evolving based on the needs and the demands and the expectations of our customers.

• Charlie Skinner

  That's great, great, yeah, great definition there. So just moving back on to, you know, the hot topic at the moment, which is obviously AI. So more generally than the last question, but what are your thoughts on AI and how it's transforming the CX industry and education?

• Ian Calkin

  AI is just really impressive. The amount it's come on in recent years is just amazing. It's had a real impact on both customer experience and education, and it's driven significant transformation in how services are delivered, and how they're experienced, to our user base and what they want from us. You know, within customer experience, it's allowing us to be more personal and customise journeys when people call us or contact us through a web message. Simple touch is like recognising the phone number that they're calling from and greeting them with their name. It's the same is true for web messaging and WhatsApp conversations. Websites can now promote predictive engagement based on visitor clicks and provide the user with that tailored experience based on what they're looking for you know in regards with education UCL is really developing AI we now are offering courses in robotics and artificial intelligence at our new campus at UCL east in Stratford that's got an impressive robotics institute that's covering a multitude of disciplines from life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing and even transportation amazing yeah super super interesting and and just

• Charlie Skinner

  obviously we've just spoken about all the uh let's say you know more positive sides of AI uh and you know UCL have have got on got on it straight away now offering courses and things like that which is great but just um in terms of you know maybe using AI tools such as chat gpt for maybe the wrong reasons it must be quite a challenge for university having to sort of keep on top of you know students utilising that. Are there anything um, is there anything UCL are doing in terms of, you know, checking for the use of AI in exams or assignments?

• Ian Calkin

  So UCL's goal is always to ensure that students are using AI in ways that supports their learning, enhancing their abilities to achieve their program learning outcomes and, you know, allowing them to succeed in their future careers.

• Charlie Skinner

  OK, so I think, yeah, I guess the UCL encourage it, but obviously in the right in the right sort of uses, really.

• Ian Calkin

  rather than you know having. Inappropriate use of ai will always undermine the benefits and damage their learning won't it yeah

• Charlie Skinner

  exactly exactly okay that's that's good so Ian final question now um and yeah i think you said this last time but you know crystal balls at the ready, what do you see as the key trends that will emerge over the next 12 months within the contact centre/customer experience space.

• Ian Calkin

  It's like you said, where's the crystal ball. It's anyone's guess, isn't it? But I think that, you know, in the next 12 months, we're going to see more demand on digital channels. You know you've got the the likes of supermarkets now that offer whatsapp chat to their customers, um being able to go to a website, click a link that sends you to a whatsapp number, and you can just talk, you can just get on with life can't you? You're not having to sit on the phone um waiting to be answered or speaking to someone, you can get on with your day-to-day life and just chat via your mobile phone. You know I still remember the time when mobiles, they didn't exist. And, you know, you had that curly cord phone on your wall at home and you had to stand there for 25, 30 minutes waiting to get through to whoever it was you was calling.

• Charlie Skinner

  It's a different time. And I guess with your, you know, with UCL's sort of customer base, the main demographic are looking at the sort of, you know, late teenagers, early 20s. So getting on, getting on, well expanding out into those digital channels like whatsapp and web messaging, things like that, is even more important I guess because that's sort of the preferred the preferred method for um yeah students nowadays I guess.

• Ian Calkin

  Absolutely they've all got mobile phones um you know, they're using social media platforms they're just used to to typing messages instead of actually phoning people up, so i think you know that the next 12 months are really going to see digital channels taking over.

• Charlie Skinner

  Definitely. Yeah, no, we're already seeing that sort of across our customers. So great. Well, Ian, I think that's it for today. So thank you so much for your time.

• Ian Calkin

  Thank you very much, Charlie. Good to talk to you.

• Speaker #0

  Thanks for listening. For other episodes and more information, head to engagecustomer.com.