Many universities are committed to providing a supportive and positive service for all and understand that starting university can represent a big change. Universities that offer Wellbeing Services aim to support students by helping them manage any issues they might encounter so they can live their student life to its fullest. Each service has different levels of support and solutions available, which means students can be transferred to more specific departments or asked to call back to get the support they need.  

Throughout their studies, students can encounter personal or academic difficulties, which is why universities have a number of specialist support services to assist students through challenging times and help them stay on track to fulfil their potential. Our customer wanted to make contacting their Wellbeing and Student Services easier for students facing study-related stress, financial issues, loneliness and isolation, as well as relationship and family problems.

In August 2019, a university contacted C3 to get a new Student Mental Health & Wellbeing Contact Centre. The university’s previous voice-only solution was no longer able to deliver the level of service they wanted to provide to their students. This project was challenging due to the tight deadlines as the university needed the solution deployed, tested and their staff trained before the beginning of the new academic year. The solution needed to ensure the university could offer effective, scalable and accessible support and advice to students, staff and external agencies when it was needed. It was also necessary to integrate new features so the university was able to record call capacities and service outcomes, to plan ahead and deliver a better service to the students needing help. 

The ideal solution was our CONTACT solution which allowed the university to consolidate and better manage their resources. By providing them with a contact centre that allowed volunteers and staff to log in from any location, they can accept enquiries no matter the time, the day or their location. The university’s previous solution was dependant on hunt groups and physical desk locations but with its new CONTACT solution, staff can now receive calls anywhere within the university, allowing for more sensitive calls to be taken away from the closed office environment.

With nearly 30 years’ experience C3 were able to surpass the university’s expectations, offering additional advice and guidance on system resilience, emergency modes, advanced reporting and future adapters (SMS, live chat and email). Being able to record the number of calls allowed the university to create historical reports to help the staff handle the enquiries quicker and more efficiently. This recording feature also allowed them to proactively monitor abandoned calls and to distribute calls to the most suited counsellors upon the first contact.