Enabling Birmingham City University to respond to applicant demands

Birmingham City University ensures seamless student and staff services with scalable cloud-based clearing solution backed by a managed service portfolio from Logicalis.

Customer Profile:

Birmingham City University (BCU) is a large, thriving higher education provider with a focus on practice-based learning, offering a wide variety of vocational based courses. Located in the heart of Birmingham, the university has two main campuses serving four faculties, and offers a variety of courses including art and design, business, computing, education, engineering, English, healthcare, law, the performing arts, social sciences and technology.

The Challenge:

As a popular UK university with a large number of courses available and student numbers rising, BCU found that its existing Clearing Process infrastructure was struggling to keep pace.

Clearing is the process that matches applicants to university places that are yet to be filled and is one of the most important calendar points for many universities. Without a robust enough platform solution to deal with high volumes of traffic, BCU experienced significant call centre issues which impacted applicant enquiries and student numbers.

Solution:

After discussing its technical requirements with trusted technology services partner Logicalis, BCU chose to go with Clearing Cloud Telephony based on Webex Contact Centre and Webex Calling with a managed service backed off to Brightcloud.

The flexibility the Logicalis solution offered meant that BCU could gain a resilient on-site contact centre that is also able operate in hybrid mode.  This flexibility allows the call centre to stay on-site whilst support and additional faculty functionality remains offsite. BCU can load test before go-live dates and automatically scale up or down depending on the number of calls from prospective students. Offering the agility and scalability needed, the Logicalis solution came away the clear winner!

BCU worked closely with Logicalis to smoothly implement the solution.

“The relationship we have with the Logicalis team has allowed us to work together and form a true partnership to deliver results” Matt Peers, Senior Project Manager, Birmingham City University.

If you would like to download the full case study, simply click HERE or contact us if you’d like to know more about how Logicalis can help you.