The News: Talkdesk, a global AI-powered contact center provider has introduced the Talkdesk Education Smart Service, a solution aimed at addressing the specific customer experience (CX) challenges faced by higher education institutions. More information on this new offering can be found on the Talkdesk website.
Talkdesk Launches Tailored CX Solution for Higher Education
Analyst Take: Talkdesk already has a sizeable collection of vertical-focused contact center solutions, currently numbered at 10 in total. In addition, the company offers cloud contact center products that are specific to industries. These can be pre-integrated with core industry systems, pre-designed with custom workflows and automation, and pre-trained with AI for industry expertise. These offerings include experience clouds for financial services, healthcare, and retail.
This new solution takes aim at the unique challenges that higher education institutions face in engaging with students, donors, and other stakeholders. Universities currently face the same challenges of other business such as inflation and labor shortages but they are also experiencing declining enrollment and funding cuts. These issues are layered on top of the disjointed way many universities or colleges operate with departments often operating independent of other groups, resulting in, you guessed it, data silos, systems and processes that do not mesh well with the larger university. Just as it happens with CX that is based on disjointed systems and operations, this can result in a poor experience for students, staff, and donors.
Talkdesk Education Smart Service aims to upgrade communication in both voice and digital channels. Using Talkdesk Agent Assist, which helps find information and craft real-time responses and guidance for agents, students can quickly get the information they need regarding topics such as financial aid or admissions. The solution helps higher education entities scale up to meet unique seasonal needs, using Talkdesk Workforce Management to help predict what contact center volumes might be during busy periods such as enrollment periods. Talkdesk Virtual Agent helps to provide a self service option to students for information finding and tasks such as IT requests or healthcare appointments. Similarly, employees can be better supported with easier access to human resource (HR) systems as well as the ability to use self-service for IT requests.
There is also an outbound contact center capability that leverages predictive dialing and CRM integrations, which can be used for alumni and donor outreach. Contact administrators and staff also have access to Talkdesk AI Trainer, a suite of tools that helps to monitor AI behavior and put protecting guardrails into place. This suite has a no-code simple interface.
Across vertical segments, there are challenges in providing great CX. Some of these issues are common to many, such as the need to help connect dissimilar resources to different types of personas. Others are fairly unique to a particular industry and a cookie cutter, cut and paste approach will not always work. Talkdesk’s Education Smart Service is a good antidote for that issue and is a solid addition to the company’s growing list of industry-specific solutions.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
CX Research from Cloudera, Verint, Talkdesk, Stanford, and Kore.ai
eGain and Talkdesk Partnership Elevates Agent and Customer Experience
Designing Virtual Agents and Chatbots for Better Customer Engagements
Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
She brings more than 20 years of experience in technology research and marketing; prior to her current role, she was a Research Analyst at Omdia, authoring market and ecosystem reports on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and User Interface technologies. Sherril was previously Manager of Market Research at Intrado Life and Safety, providing competitive analysis and intelligence, business development support, and analyst relations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
