Transforming student communications: How Dallas College modernized its call center with AWS

For decades, Dallas College has been a beacon of affordable higher education in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Founded in 1965, this community college has welcomed more than 3 million students through its doors, empowering them to forge new careers, obtain vital training, and give back to their community.

However, as enrollment swelled over the years, Dallas College’s legacy call center struggled to keep pace. “One of our biggest challenges was not having enough people to answer phones,” says Steve Glick, Dallas College’s associate director of IT, who is responsible for student engagement platforms. “As a result, hold times were sometimes over an hour.” The system was frequently overwhelmed by the sheer volume of calls—an average of 30,000 to 40,000 a month, peaking at 50,000 during the start of the school year. Worst still, critical information, from course changes to school closure announcements, often failed to reach the college’s 140,000 credit and non-credit students in a timely manner.

Recognizing the need for a modern, efficient call center to deliver a better customer experience, the Dallas College leadership turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for help.

A comprehensive AWS-powered solution in under four months

At the time, Dallas College was already in the process of migrating parts of the college’s IT infrastructure to AWS. College leaders mentioned their struggling call center to their AWS team, who quickly highlighted a potential solution: Amazon Connect.

Amazon Connect is a cloud-powered contact center solution that uses a comprehensive collection of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to resolve customer issues faster, more thoroughly, and more efficiently.

The AWS team presented a detailed solution to Dallas College, followed by a two-day collaborative workshop and a dynamic proof-of-concept (POC). During this POC, the college’s administrators saw firsthand how Amazon Connect could be customized to include all of their desired features—from delivering thousands of pre-recorded student announcements to implementing more efficient call navigation and speech detection capabilities.

Impressed by the capabilities and agility of Amazon Connect, the college’s leadership team gave the green light to build the complete solution. Just four months later, with the help of AWS Partner CloudHesive, Dallas College went live with its new AWS-powered contact center across all seven campuses. The new solution not only included all the features requested by school leadership, but also went above and beyond to drastically improve the overall student calling experience.

Dramatic efficiency gains and faster student communications

The implementation of Amazon Connect delivered significant improvements to the efficiency and responsiveness of Dallas College’s call center operations. The most notable change was the drastic reduction in agent handle times—the time it takes for a call center agent to receive a call, conduct the conversation, and input relevant data before moving on to the next call.

Under the legacy system, handle times could range anywhere from 30 minutes to a staggering two hours. However, Amazon Connect transformed this process, resulting in a remarkable 120 percent improvement. “We’re down to most calls taking five minutes, maybe 30 minutes at the longest,” says Casey Conner, systems administrator at Dallas College. “And that 30 minutes would only be when somebody has a really complex problem that has to be escalated.”

Thanks to Amazon Connect’s streamlined data-management capabilities, agents no longer had to waste valuable time searching through old records and manually typing in information. If a student had called before, their contact information automatically populated, allowing agents to focus entirely on addressing the student’s needs. Moreover, Amazon Connect integrated all pertinent information about the caller and their issue on a single dashboard, eliminating the need to toggle between multiple third-party applications.

“To scale our system’s emphasis on student experience and satisfaction, we pursue technology-based solutions capable of augmenting and enhancing staff engagement whit those we serve and want to serve,” says Dr. Bradford Williams, vice chancellor of operations at Dallas College. “Connect enables us to better manage our telephone call volumes and save students’ time and energy.”

Beyond the gains in agent efficiency, Amazon Connect’s scalability also enabled Dallas College to quickly send out recorded alerts and announcements to its entire student body as needed, whether it was informing them of campus closures due to inclement weather or updating them on holiday hours. This capability allowed the college to disseminate critical information to its 140,000 students in as little as 10 minutes—a process that used to take hours—drastically improving the timeliness of their communications.

Leveraging AI to enhance the student experience and boost employee morale

A key component of Dallas College’s revamped contact center was the integration of QnABot on AWS, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled multi-channel, multi-language conversational chatbot that responds to questions, answers, and feedback.

“Our bots provide us with a way to position our information so that students can interact with it at any given time of day,” says Dr. Williams. “The bots present students with an option to self-serve prior to reaching out for additional help and support.”

Callers can now interact with the QnABot, asking questions and expressing their concerns. The bot responds based on information stored in an Amazon Kendra intelligent database, providing accurate answers to the most common student inquiries. Automating and resolving these common questions has allowed Amazon Connect to seamlessly route more complex student questions to live agents. As a result, agents are able to spend more quality one-on-one time supporting students, leading to deeper, more impactful conversations.

“The overall demeanor and well-being of the Dallas College staff has increased immensely. The monotony of repetitive calls has gone away,” says Bill Snyder, an AWS solutions architect who supported Dallas College’s solution. “The agents feel like they’re having impactful conversations with students much more often.”

Enhancing the student experience through omnichannel capabilities and future innovations

With its new call center now operational, Dallas College is focused on further expanding the capabilities and reach of its student communication channels. Within the next two years, the college plans to roll out an omnichannel version of the contact center, enabling students to connect with the institution in a variety of methods—whether that’s traditional phone calls, SMS messaging, video call routing, or online/mobile chat.

This omnichannel approach will provide students with unprecedented flexibility and convenience, allowing them to engage with the college in whichever way best suits their individuals needs and preferences. Looking even further ahead, Dallas College is also considering how to incorporate generative AI technologies to synthesize information from the college’s extensive knowledge base into useful summaries and updates to proactively send to its student community.

Underpinning these innovative enhancements is the robust, scalable cloud infrastructure that Amazon Connect has provided Dallas College. The solution’s ability to seamlessly scale resources up or down, along with its continuous delivery of new tools and capabilities, gives the college the agility to adapt and expand its student communication channels as needed.

Ultimately, these advancements are all in service of Dallas College’s unwavering commitment to providing its students—its most important stakeholders—with a truly customized, user-friendly experience.

Learn how other colleges and universities use AWS to serve their students, staff, researchers, and more at AWS for Higher Education.

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