The clearing process is more pressurised than ever before with Universities looking to fill their last percentage of course places in order to secure fee income.  Many institutions are hoping that clearing will become less of a frenetic last chance saloon and more of a measured late application process, but these are still late applications that need to be dealt with promptly and professionally with competition among institutions fierce.

It is crucial that universities engage with as many prospective students as possible and provide them with the right information at the right time. This can be a challenge; dealing with and resourcing the unpredictable nature of call volumes.  To solve this issue, universities have traditionally provisioned additional spare capacity to handle this one-off spike in demand. However paying for lines and infrastructure that are only in use for one month out of 12 is a costly approach.  Other universities have experimented with outsourcing the call overspill to cloud providers but, with thousands of pounds of income at stake, they can be understandably nervous about giving up control over those calls to unproven third party providers.

C3 offers a cost-effective, flexible, on-demand service to manage your annual clearing, accommodation and financing peaks in incoming communication traffic. Our solutions can be deployed on your network giving you additional capacity and call control for the duration of these peaks, so you are only paying for what you use.  Alternatively, we can manage your incoming call queues and take them away from your University infrastructure and deliver them to agents when they become available.

C3’s software is core technology-agnostic. Our applications, which include IVR, unified messaging and multichannel contact centre, can be deployed at any point in the IP migration process, on a ‘pay as you use’ licensing model. This flexibility enables clients to sweat existing assets by installing leading-edge communication technology on their PBX, and then simply moving these applications across to SIP environment when required, ensuring a consistent user experience throughout the transition.

C3’s scalable platform supports a range of multichannel communication applications.  Complementary applications, such as voice recognition, call recording and PCI billing, can be added to the platform on an incremental basis to suit the unique requirements and budgets of each customer.

This new generation of students, who has grown up with SMS, email and social media, is used to interacting in real time with their friends and family, as well as the brands that they choose to buy products and services from. The HE institutions that will excel in this competitive environment are the ones who rapidly evolve their infrastructure to reflect the multichannel reality of communications.

C3 specialises in customer engagement platforms for the HE market. The C3 platform enables institutions to engage with customers across multiple channels, and deployments typically incorporate C3’s multichannel contact centre and IVR software.

The platform offers advanced contact centre interaction management functionality, including sophisticated voice control, advanced self-service, proactive outbound communications, speech recognition and, importantly, multichannel functionality to support the routing, queuing, tracking and reporting of all enquiries regardless of channel.

For more information about our product suite and how we can support your organisation in improving your clearing process by streamlining communications please come and visit us on stand 20 or contact us for a demonstration on sales@c3.co.uk