Penn Foster: Moving to Five9 and Oracle for A+ Personalized Customer Experiences

“The ability to provide consistent, relevant, and easily digestible communications to the student base allows for a better customer experience and increased satisfaction.” -Emily Cramer, Contact Center Technical Project Manager, Penn Foster, Inc.

For over 125 years, Penn Foster has dedicated itself to helping people lead more meaningful and productive lives and improving social outcomes through education. Penn Foster provides career pathways for people of all ages with a wide range of affordable education options for high school, college, and career advancement. With more than 40,000 graduates each year, Penn Foster’s online and blended learning programs are delivered in a self-paced, competency-based model combined with comprehensive academic, professional coaching and personal support.

Penn Foster has 300 agents at its contact centers across Pennsylvania (headquarters), Arizona, and Canada, as well as at an outsourced contact center in Ohio. The contact center operation supports many functional areas for Penn Foster including accounting, admissions, client services, financial services, student services and success coaching.

Prior to migrating to Five9, Penn Foster was operating a legacy ACD for routing that was over 20 years old, separate call recording with an IVR to gather information about the caller and different call center systems in each call center. As a result, Penn Foster knew they needed a new contact center solution.

Among the criteria for the new solution was the ability to integrate with their CRM system, Oracle Service Cloud. Penn Foster wanted to empower contact center leaders including managers, supervisors, and team leads to have more visibility and ownership of the student experience. The system also needed to scale easily to handle seasonal fluxuations and growth. And the system had to allow for agent mobility, needed to provide increased visibility into contact center statistics and performance indicators to enable more efficiency and allow for management of remote agents.

With Five9 they were able to accomplish their original objectives and see benefits including:

• Integration with Oracle Service Cloud gives agents greater insights into customer data to provide improved, personalized customer experiences
• 18% increase in year over year service level despite an overall volume increase of calls
• Inbound abandon rate decreased by 6.7%
• Improved reporting and data provides insights into trending and pain points to manage staff more effectively
• Better call routing ensures customer calls are handled more efficiently
• Disaster recovery and geo-redundancy
• Automatic upgrades

“Five9 offers the best customer support out of any contact center vendor I’ve worked with before. From the implementation process to software going live in our contact centers to now, the Five9 team has supported us every step of the way,”- Emily Cramer, Contact Center Technical Project Manager, Penn Foster, Inc.

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