King’s College London is one of the world’s leading research and teaching universities, with an international reputation for academic excellence. In 2014, the number of applicants to the College topped 40,000, the equivalent of ten students for every available place. A small percentage of these failed to achieve their expected results, creating opportunities for other candidates to gain places.
On A-Level results day, the College therefore became inundated by thousands of calls from students eager to find out whether they had secured their conditional offers and accommodation, or whether they had qualified for one of the few places left open by failed candidates.
Content Guru deployed its mass-scale cloud communications integration solution, storm®, to overlay King’s College London’s existing communications infrastructure. storm provided a cloud buffer, automatically scaling to handle any volume of enquiries before they hit the College’s confirmations line.
storm provided the College with Automated Contact Center and iACD functionality to handle calls more efficiently, reducing the number of unanswered calls to less than 0.7%.
When all agents were busy, calls were queued on storm. Automated prompts advised callers of their places in the queue and estimated wait times.
storm enabled King’s to leverage the solution’s massive cloud-based capacity for just one month during the busy exam results period.
Project Manager, King’s College London
“A-level results day represents our contact center’s busiest time in the academic calendar. We can receive up to a thousand student enquiries within the space of an hour, which in a typical year outstrips the capabilities of our on-premise infrastructure. In 2014, storm helped us to better meet this challenge. Its effectively unlimited capacity for contact handling, with vast numbers of simultaneous enquiries queued in the cloud, enabled us to automatically scale up our contact center’s capacity and address the excess traffic. Furthermore, the College only paid for the actual capacity it used; we were thus able to respond to 99% of inquiries whilst comfortably staying within budget.”
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