Erasmus University Rotterdam improves communication with WhatsApp integration

We spoke with Maria Korteweg and Ilona Heeres – van Kranenburg, both working as consultants at the department of Advice and Management of Educational Systems (ABO). The ABO department plays a crucial role in managing the centrally managed educational systems and supporting the educational processes within the university.

Challenge

Since 2009, EUR has been working with TriniCo, which was known as Trinicom at the time and later as Kana Express and Verint Express. This collaboration was set up to efficiently answer students' questions at the student desk and to offer other communication channels, such as e-mail and web forms.

Students can now contact and ask questions via these communication channels. In 2021, WhatsApp was added. However, this new communication channel ran in a different application, which caused two problems. First, the TriniCo knowledge base could not be used directly when answering the contacts, which led to inefficient work such as copying and pasting, retyping or rethinking answers. Second, there was duplication of questions from the same students via different channels, which made it a challenge for employees to maintain an overview and prevent multiple (sometimes non-matching) answers to the same question.

Solution: Integration of WhatsApp in TriniCo

WhatsApp as a widely used communication channel

The Front Office makes extensive use of telephony, web contact forms and physical contact at the counter. However, since the corona pandemic, physical contact at the counter has decreased; the counter is now only physically staffed three days a week instead of five. WhatsApp offers a nice alternative for this. This new communication channel appears to be an accessible and increasingly used way for students to make contact.

Further development

Because the agents support both Dutch and international students, they quickly noticed that it is difficult to determine from a message in which language the student is communicating. This made it difficult to determine from which language version of the knowledge base the agents had to retrieve the answer to answer a WhatsApp message. In addition, switching between different knowledge bases turned out to be not easy.

Thanks to a further development, agents can now automatically switch the language in the knowledge base when replying to a WhatsApp message, so that they can provide the correct answer.

A further development is currently underway that will allow EUR to obtain more information from students who contact us via WhatsApp but are not yet registered in the system. An automated question flow helps to quickly and automatically create a profile of a student, without the intervention of an agent. By asking questions such as 'What is your student number?' or 'What are your details?' a customer card is automatically created in the system. This gives agents more information when handling a contact, such as who the customer is, which prevents unnecessary questions and waiting times.

Cooperation

Maria and Ilona indicate that since the acquisition of the software by Harbers Solutions, they have experienced that there is a lot of room for submitting wishes and ideas. Since the acquisition by Harbers, a great collaboration has been set up and we complement each other in our ideas and solutions when using TriniCo. The majority of the wishes have been developed or are on the list to be developed.”

Ilona Heeres emphasizes the importance of the collaboration: “The collaboration with Harbers Solutions in using TriniCo has helped both EUR and TriniCo to develop a better product. Thanks to the integration, our agents work more efficiently and we can provide consistent information.”

Maria Korteweg adds: “The short lines and the joint approach mainly ensure that we can coordinate well between EUR and Harbers. This allows us to respond quickly to the needs of our students and employees. We are very satisfied with the results so far and are enthusiastic about future developments.”