Fanter said he understood that building a student services system was not Ivy Tech’s core competency, and that the college could benefit from the wider scalability options and faster installation time that a partnership could offer.
Ivy Tech previously had invested in Blackboard’s Learning Management System (LMS) and was happy with its experience. Fanter said he was impressed with Blackboard’s recent expansion into student services and wanted to be part of the movement.
A changing tide
The result of this partnership was Ivy Tech’s Student Success Help Center. Today, all inbound calls to Ivy Tech are transferred to a trained professional at one of Blackboard’s two remote call centers located in Texas and Kentucky.
“We went to Kentucky for a week and did all-day training with the [call center] agents,” said Fanter. “Our people taught them the Ivy Tech way.”
Call center agents can access student records efficiently using Blackboard portals, enabling Ivy Tech to stay “proactive instead of reactive,” according to Fanter.
Students from any Ivy Tech campus now can access their records and information using one phone number. Both call centers are open from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. seven days a week, granting students maximum accessibility.
To understand the impact of the Blackboard Student Service model, Fanter compared data from January 2012, before Ivy Teach had implemented the system, to data from January 2013.
On average, before implementing the Blackboard Student Service model, students would wait on hold for upwards of 19 minutes to speak with a college representative; now, the average student wait time has been sliced to 30 seconds. Because of the extensive wait time, Ivy Tech previously experienced a 49-percent phone call abandonment rate; current phone call abandonment rates are a mere 1.46 percent.
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(Next page: How important are student services models?)
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