Universities and colleges are busy places where the phone never stops ringing, but that doesn’t mean that your students need to suffer from problems related to dorm living or wait forever to get an appointment with campus health services.
Instead of trying to predict the ebb and flow of student telephone traffic, or relying on a complicated phone tree to get callers to the right department voicemail, partnering with an educational answering service or an answering service for universities could be the perfect solution for your school, your student body and the community that you serve.
These are just a few of the services an answering service partner can perform for a busy college or university campus:
- Call routing. Instead of a complicated phone tree, let your first impression be one made by a live operator. A real person can answer each and every call, then route the caller to the appropriate department. If the caller needs a little extra help determining who to speak with, the human element helps a lot in working that out.
- Bilingual operators. Your campus is a diverse place that services speakers of a variety of languages, so why are your operators only speaking English? Stop telling your other callers that they mean a little less to you and instead provide them with operators who can help them in their native language. Encourage campus diversity from the very first impression.
- Caller assistance. Whether your callers are dorm residents looking for help filing a noise complaint or prospective students wanting more information on your school mailed to them, your answering service partner can give you the necessary hand.You’ll simply provide the training materials to enable your answering service partner to perform a variety of tasks, from requesting forms to be mailed to students to assisting with callers from the community who utilize university hospital services. Even your campus bookstore can get a helping hand from a university answering service!
- Emergency alerts and disaster recovery. No one wants to have an emergency on campus, but they happen. Whether the issue is rough weather bearing down or a more human problem, your campus population deserves to know right away. An answering service has the equipment to send out mass SMS alerts that explain the situation, keeping everyone safe.In the days following a disaster, your answering service will be there to answer the influx of calls about when the campus will reopen, which classes are canceled and when they’ll resume. Your answering service can help get things back to normal as quickly as possible.
There are so many jobs that need to be done at a university or college campus that it often feels like the work never gets done. Luckily, you don’t have to do it all alone…you can partner with an answering service to handle a lot of the repetitive day-to-day tasks. From admissions to financial aid, the campus bookstore, campus life and even community-based services like medical services, your university or college will see a huge benefit without a huge price tag from partnering with an educational answering service.
