Read more about Ferris State’s success with Tenfold in the full case study here.

Across industries, Tenfold’s commitment is to help organizations have better conversations.

For educational institutions like Ferris State University in Michigan, building relationships with prospective students and strengthening ties with current enrollees are the top priorities.

Processing anywhere between 200 and 500 calls a day, the Admissions Office at Ferris State is tasked to handle recruitment, financial aid, and student relations. Staffed by a mix of full-time professionals and student representatives, the teams under the Admissions Office ensure that the pipeline is filled with recruits from within and outside Michigan, campus activities are promoted, and prospects and continuing students are supported throughout the enrollment process.

Challenge: Disparate Systems Result in Unreliable Data Management and Poor Call Operations

Like many high call volume environments, one of the main challenges of the Admissions Office at Ferris State was streamlining their call workflow.

Ferris State uses Salesforce as their CRM, Avaya as their phone system, and Banner as their student information system (SIS). Due to security reasons, student representatives don’t have full access to all systems.

Phone-based teams, composed mostly of student representatives, were losing valuable time verifying caller information multiple times, searching and pulling up records, manual dialing, and logging call notes in disparate systems.

Management was also struggling to pull accurate reports as call notes had to be constantly logged in multiple places to ensure all student records are updated based on the results of calls.

As their tedious and time-consuming workflow left a lot of space for errors and inefficiencies, the Admissions Office started looking for a solution that could help them streamline their processes and would work with all their existing systems.

Solution: Efficient Call Workflow with a Full-Feature CTI

Ferris State evaluated several computer-telephony integration (CTI) solutions to bridge their different systems.

Tenfold came to the table with an easy-to-implement full-feature CTI that works with Salesforce and Avaya, and, most importantly, allows them to keep their current 1-800 number.

“When we were looking at the demo through Tenfold, everything seemed very easy to use, the interface was easy, and nobody had to do extra work to be able to use it besides logging in every day,” Jessica Davidson, Coordinator for Communications and Visitor Services at Ferris, says. “It puts everything that we need to know about that student in one spot, and our student representatives are able to access that same screen.”

Why Ferris State Continues to Choose Tenfold

From the start, the ease of implementation provided by Tenfold resulted in a short time to value for Ferris, allowing them to immediately benefit and see the solution’s impact on their workflow.

Additionally, Davidson described the implementation process as “very simple” and “very easy.” Ferris describes their experience with Tenfold as “fairly issue-free” and Tenfold’s support team has always been available to provide support to Ferris for any issues that come up.

Ferris State Admissions has now been a Tenfold customer for more than a year and a half. With Tenfold, Ferris State Admissions has been able to focus on their conversations with students and prospects without fearing for lost data and missed opportunities because of siloed records and error-prone processes.

With CTI features like click-to-dial, screen pops, and automatic call logging, Tenfold allows the teams at Ferris State Admissions to save time and keep updated records, allowing them to focus more on the call itself instead of pre- and post-call work.

“We have three separate teams on Tenfold right now,” shares Davidson. “Before Tenfold, we spent a lot more time trying to solve problems that really would’ve been solved had we just known who talked to that person and what they said to them. We now have that data within the student record in Salesforce.”

Additionally, the Tenfold dashboard has added value to both the staff and the leaders in different ways. Leaders use the analytics and data visualization to monitor and track the team’s performance and call trends, while the staff uses the analytics for productivity-driving gamification and the trends to effectively plan their workdays.

To this day, Ferris State continues to reap the benefits of using Tenfold–the most of important of which is building better relationships with the students.

Read more about Ferris State’s success with Tenfold in the full case study here.