Australia’s leading higher education institution is transforming student engagement with Genesys Cloud

Genesys®, a global cloud leader in AI-powered experience orchestration, today announced Western Sydney University (WSU) was named the Customer Experience (CX) Achiever winner in the small-to-medium business and mid-market subcategory during its 19th annual Customer Innovation Awards. WSU received the award for transforming student engagement and empowering its employees to deliver exceptional experiences with the Genesys Cloud™ platform.

WSU established 12 contact centers, leveraging a mix of voice and web chat to communicate with more than 47,000 students. As student numbers skyrocketed, WSU agents received over one million calls each year. The continually increasing influx in volume, coupled with the university’s fragmented contact center infrastructure, forced agents to switch between multiple applications — leading to unanswered calls and low-quality, disconnected experiences.

WSU turned to the Genesys Cloud platform’s AI-powered experience orchestration capabilities to consolidate its communication methods into a single, unified interface and tap into more digital channels to better connect with its students. The WSU deployment of Genesys Cloud has transformed student engagement, and the university's agents are better equipped with the tools they need to deliver timely, personalized responses across its global network of campuses.

Students are now able to initiate conversations seamlessly across a variety of communication channels, including voice, messaging, SMS and WhatsApp. Agents facilitated more than 570,000 interactions on these new channels in 2023 with a significant increase expected in 2024.

The digital evolution at WSU also resulted in a 90% improvement in voice abandonment rates and a 65% improvement in average speed of answer, leading to more positive and seamless experiences between students and agents.

The transformation delivered by Genesys Cloud extends beyond student engagement and has changed the day-to-day experience for WSU contact center employees. The platform’s user-friendly interface and consolidated view of multiple channels streamlined agent workflows, resulting in initial daily productivity gains of up to 30 minutes per agent.

“The overwhelmingly positive feedback from our agents highlights the success of this transformation,” said Scott Snyder, chief information and digital officer at Western Sydney University. “Staff are praising the Genesys Cloud platform’s reliability, functionality, and ability to deliver faster and clearer responses to students.”

Western Sydney University is one of Australia's leading higher learning institutions, ranked in the top 250 universities globally and number one in the world for its social, economic and environmental impact in the Times Higher Education (THE) University Impact Rankings in 2022 and 2023.

Founded in 1989, WSU has grown to become a multicampus institution offering undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral research degrees. It offers courses in a wide range of areas, including business, education, social sciences and health care.

The CX Achiever award recognizes organizations that use Genesys technology to reimagine customer experiences while giving employees the ability to deliver smarter outcomes with less effort. During its annual Customer Innovation Awards, Genesys recognizes organizations from across the globe for transforming their customer and employee experiences with AI, cloud and digital technologies.

WSU will accept the CX Achiever award at Genesys Xperience Sydney in July.

To watch select Xperience keynotes on-demand, visit the Xperience Encore event beginning May 27.

About Genesys

Genesys empowers more than 8,000 organizations in over 100 countries to improve loyalty and business outcomes by creating the best experiences for customers and employees. Through Genesys Cloud, the #1 AI-powered experience orchestration platform, Genesys delivers the future of CX to organizations of all sizes so they can provide empathetic, personalized experience at scale. As the trusted, all-in-one platform born in the cloud, Genesys Cloud accelerates growth for organizations by enabling them to differentiate with the right customer experience at the right time, while driving stronger workforce engagement, efficiency and operational improvements.

Media: Lauren Baca, Genesys lauren.baca@genesys.com

Method Communications genesys@methodcommunications.com