Adrienne T. Martin knows the ins and outs of Troy University. What happens if a new student can’t make it to orientation? Ms. Martin has the answer. She can reset e-mail passwords, rattle off how much students can borrow for each year of college, and let hopeful applicants know when to expect those admissions decisions.
“Thank you for calling Troy University,” Ms. Martin answers calls to its 800 number. “My name is Adrienne. How may I help you?”
What callers may not realize is that she isn’t at Troy’s main campus, in Southeastern Alabama—or any of its other locations. She’s not even a university employee.
In fact, Ms. Martin is taking calls from an office building here in Central Texas, some 700 miles from the city of Troy. Her employer, Greenwood & Hall, handles phone traffic for clients that include 35 colleges and universities.
Troy officials like working with a round-the-clock call center, says Ronnie Creel, director of education technology at the university. It lets the 26,000 students “get their questions answered on their schedules, not ours,” he says. Greenwood & Hall offers its clients the best customer service “blended with the institution’s culture,” says Zantine Greenwood, one of the company’s founders.
Even for smaller colleges, answering all calls—especially on financial-aid issues—can be a major challenge. Bringing in a vendor is one way to handle the volume, and some colleges have worked with third-party call centers for years. Some of them, however, were run by big lenders, which halted that service after a conflict-of-interest investigation. In general, the call-center model can be a tough sell on campuses. Students have important questions, the thinking of opponents goes, and colleges are supposed to guide them. Can educators trust customer-service agents to handle such key conversations?
Of course, not every college always does a great job answering students’ questions itself. Just keeping up with phone traffic has been hard for financial-aid offices. First they faced the conflict-of-interest investigation, which exposed some offices’ improper dealings with lenders; then they had to weather the recession and a great wave of struggling families. As aid offices are getting more calls, from students with greater need, universities’ budget cuts are limiting the staff and resources to handle that demand. What’s more, aid offices are contending with a slew of new federal regulations, not to mention a generation of consumers widely seen as entitled, expecting immediate answers in every exchange.
The busiest times of the year—like the end of summer, when families try to figure out how to pay the coming year’s bill—can be unrelenting. Last winter, an aid director struck a nerve on a popular e-mail list by describing how her boss had complained when he called her office and got a busy signal. Her post prompted a flurry of sympathetic replies. “We don’t have voice mail because we can’t possibly call back every student that leaves a message,” one aid director wrote. “Our phones are always busy,” said another. “There have been times when the callers would call another office at our school just to reverify that we are really in our office and not closed or something.”
A call center, then, can offer relief and ensure that students and families never have to wait very long to talk to a real person. Financial-aid officers and other administrators think that, if the customer service is good, a center can boost recruitment and retention. Another mark in call centers’ favor is that while they take care of phone traffic, a financial-aid staff is freer, for instance, to develop long-term strategies, improve processes, and ponder how best to inform students of ways they might pay for college.
Greenwood & Hall’s higher-education clients—typically community colleges, large universities, and for-profit institutions—tend to rely on the company to handle questions about financial aid and billing. Some colleges, though, have expanded their contracts to include other student services. The institutions pay between $4.50 and $6.50 per call, give or take. The precise price depends on factors like the length and complexity of the call, and the scope of the company’s work with that client.
Greenwood & Hall and a handful of companies like it have been able to drum up business in the higher-education market because they don’t offer students anything but help. The model of lenders counseling students on colleges’ behalf fell apart after Andrew M. Cuomo, then New York’s attorney general, cracked down on conflicts of interest in the student-loan industry. As part of settlements with Mr. Cuomo, Sallie Mae agreed to end its call-center service to colleges, as did another lender, Nelnet. In 2007, Greenwood & Hall bought Nelnet’s call center in Texas, taking on more higher-education clients. Since then—counting calls, Web chats, and e-mails—it has handled more than 14 million transactions for colleges.
Accents and Greetings
For the University of Mississippi, phone calls about financial aid have long come fast and furious. When enrollment grew in the 1990s, campus officials could hardly keep up. “We never felt we did our best in terms of serving our customers, our students and families,” says Dewey Knight, associate director of financial aid.
The aid office pushed to use a call center, he says, but the administration resisted. In 2003, there was a meltdown. As the office moved to a new software system at a peak phone-traffic time, the financial-aid staff could not empty the office’s voice mail before it filled up again.
Soon after, Mississippi signed a contract with Sallie Mae. That made a world of difference, say Mr. Knight and Laura Diven-Brown, the university’s financial-aid director. All calls were answered right away, by a person, as families expected. And the aid staff turned to strategic planning.
When Sallie Mae, under fire, closed its shop, Mississippi signed with a new vendor. The company made a good effort, says Mr. Knight, but lacked the scale to offer what the university needed at a price it could afford. So Mississippi looked around again and started working with Greenwood & Hall in 2009. Last year—with a dozen or two employees on the Ole Miss team, depending on the time of year—the company answered 102,000 calls for the university.
This summer, Ms. Diven-Brown, Mr. Knight, and two colleagues took a university van to Bryan to meet with the people who answer Ole Miss calls.
Here in a concrete building off a busy road, the university officials sat in a conference room with the local Greenwood & Hall employees on the Mississippi team. Others who answer the university’s calls from centers in California and Florida joined in via Skype. Multiple sites give the company an advantage: If a natural disaster should strike one area, employees elsewhere can pick up the slack. Also, a client can more easily find employees with accents that fit its region. Ole Miss administrators are attentive to that.
Each year a Mississippi contingent visits Bryan to get the call-center staff up to speed on the ever-changing rules surrounding federal student aid. The summer is a good time, before calls pour in, many from a particularly intense, vulnerable character: the parent of a student leaving home for the first time.
The face time also strengthens the affinity the far-flung customer-service agents feel for the university they represent. Mr. Knight stressed the importance of that affinity in a presentation to them. “In many, many cases,” he said, “you are the University of Mississippi to so many of our students and our parents.”
Mr. Knight shared two tales about the origin of the university’s traditional greeting, “Hotty toddy.” If someone says it on the phone, he told the call-center employees, they should respond, “Hotty toddy.” Later, he had them all practice the Ole Miss cheer, which includes the phrase.
Each time agents answer the phone, they must offer the personal attention families expect from the university, Mr. Knight said. He brought along Ole Miss T-shirts for everybody.
Mississippi doesn’t hide that its phones are answered by a call center, says Ms. Diven-Brown. But it doesn’t broadcast that fact either. If a call-center representative puts a Mississippi student or parent on hold, the music they hear is the university’s marching band.
Help from ‘Off-Site’
Greenwood & Hall puts its employees through considerable training, and about a third of the call-center agents have been to the campuses they represent, Mr. Greenwood estimates.
Ms. Martin, who has been at the company for only a year, hasn’t visited Troy yet, but down the road she might. Still, she can answer many students’ questions off the top of her head. If she has to look something up, she buys time with a short speech—prepared but conversational—about Troy’s new smartphone app. It’s important, she says, not to have too much silence during the calls. Ms. Martin has given a lot of thought to how she interacts with students over the phone. Listening and using a nice tone, she says, go a long way.
Ms. Martin asks all callers for two bits of information to confirm their identity. When students need to speak to someone who actually works for Troy, she puts them on hold, gets a university employee on another line, and makes the connection. Sometimes callers ask Ms. Martin for her direct line; she explains politely that she doesn’t have an extension, saying that anyone who answers later will be able to help.
After each call, she electronically logs the student’s problem and her solution. Financial-aid issues require additional documentation. The idea is for Ms. Martin to resolve most problems herself, in one fell swoop, as any agent should be able to do. Beyond that, she looks over each caller’s files for any red flags. If she can save them a problem down the road, all the better.
Greenwood & Hall’s leaders aren’t terribly fond of the term “call center,” which they say sounds like an overseas operation. The company has no plans to go outside the country because it needs the right accents and an ability to absorb clients’ culture. The term “outsourcing” doesn’t work either, according to the company, which says it practices “co-sourcing.” If Ms. Martin does her job well, the logic goes, a caller will never wonder where she is or who employs her.
Parker Smith, a junior at Troy and vice president of legislative affairs for its student government, has never called the university’s 800 number, he says, and didn’t realize such calls weren’t answered in-house. But, in a world of call centers, he is hardly shocked. “Troy is a global campus,” he says. “I guess I can see why they’d do it.”
Each client of Greenwood & Hall dictates what its employees should do if directly asked whether they work for the university. Troy has representatives answer the phone as if they were on the campus, but explain, if pressed, that they work for a call center in partnership with the university. They can also easily transfer callers to bona fide Troy employees. Such requests, somewhat more common when Troy first started using a call center several years ago, are rare now that callers are used to that model.
Some students seem to know, Ms. Martin says; maybe they’ll ask where she is. “Off-site,” she’ll respond. “We take calls for all Troy campuses.” She isn’t sure that makes a difference to students if they’re getting the help they need: “I find I’m easily able to answer their questions.”
And maybe that’s all that matters. Here in Bryan, Rick Hernandez, a team lead associate at the company, got a call recently from a student at Troy who had locked himself out of his dorm room. Mr. Hernandez knew exactly which housing official could help and transferred the student’s call. As long as the student was let back into his room, he might not care how he got there.
