A deadline. A hold. A financial aid question. The semester can hinge on the answer.
When enrollment and registration demand peaks, Five9 gives your team a student engagement platform that keeps routine questions moving and the harder ones connected to the right person. AI, advisors and the systems you already use work together so students get the help they need without losing context along the way.
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Trusted by colleges and universities nationwide
Capabilities
Keep student support moving when demand, channels and needs change.
From AI agents and journey management to workforce planning, Five9 gives your higher education contact centre the capabilities to connect student context, keep routine work moving and prepare for the moments when demand peaks.
Office hours end. Student questions don’t.
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Help students make progress, not just get an answer. AI agents can check connected application or student information, identify what’s outstanding and guide the student to the next step for configured enrolment, registration and financial aid tasks.
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Give students a way forward when your staff is offline. AI agents can handle configured questions and tasks after hours, so a late-night enrollment or financial aid issue doesn’t automatically wait until the next business day.
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Avoid answers that ignore what your institution already knows. Connect AI agents with student information systems, CRM and other systems so available enrollment, application and advising context can inform the interaction.
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Make the transition to an advisor count. When an interaction reaches the AI agent’s configured boundary, Five9 can pass the conversation and relevant context forward so the person stepping in has a clearer place to start.
More student conversations. Same team.
See how higher education teams use Five9 to handle growing demand, connect student context across systems and give advisors more capacity for the conversations that matter.
Regent University
As enrollment grew, Regent University needed its admissions, financial aid and student advisory teams to respond faster without simply adding staff. Its on-premises contact centre couldn’t scale with demand or connect cleanly to Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Five9 gives agents more time to speak with students and truly develop a relationship.
Keep the student journey connected from first inquiry to enrolment.
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Keep the student moving forward instead of starting over. As they move from inquiry to application, financial aid and advising, Five9 can carry available interaction context forward so each new conversation starts with more of the story already known.
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Help advisors pick up where the last interaction left off. Bring relevant application, enrollment and prior-interaction context into view so they can spend less time reconstructing the history and more time helping with what comes next.
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A student shouldn’t have to rebuild the same story for admissions, financial aid and advising. Preserve the context already captured across connected interactions so the next person has a clearer place to start.
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Connect the moments that shape enrollment. From first inquiry through application and student support, keep interaction history available as the student moves across channels, teams and stages.
The schedule that already knows registration week is coming.
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Get ahead of the spike. Five9 Workforce Management uses forecasted interaction volume to help teams build schedules around expected demand instead of relying on last week’s staffing pattern.
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Registration, enrolment and financial aid deadlines can compress weeks of demand into a few critical days. Forecast against those known peaks so your higher education contact centre can plan coverage before volume starts climbing.
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Use the workforce you actually have. Schedule part-time staff and student workers against the same forecast as full-time advisors so additional coverage can be placed where demand is expected.
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Spot the gap before it becomes a queue problem. Five9 OneVUE brings schedule coverage and adherence into the supervisor view so leaders can see where staffing is tracking to plan and where they may need to adjust.
Forecast call volume runs to 312% of baseline across six days. The schedule below assembles against that curve, not against last week's staffing.
Why Five9
Why Five9 for higher education
The hard part isn't answering enrollment or financial aid questions. It's answering them without losing the student's journey — the application status, the decisions already made, the deadlines that matter. Five9 connects AI, advisors and student systems so every interaction carries context forward and students move toward enrollment, not circles around the same questions.
Keep the student interaction connected
A question may start in self-service, move to voice and end with an advisor. Five9 Engage helps carry available student and conversation context across channels so the interaction doesn’t restart every time the student moves.
Turn the interaction into the next step
An answer isn’t enough if a hold still needs review or a financial aid question needs follow-up. Five9 Orchestrate connects AI, people and workflows so the next action can move to the right team or system based on the situation.
Learn from the pressure points
Peak periods expose where the operation breaks down. Five9 Optimize helps teams see interaction patterns, workforce performance and emerging friction so they can adjust staffing, coaching and workflows before the next surge.
FAQ
Questions higher education buyers ask first
Compliance, student privacy, and SIS/CRM integration — answered before procurement asks.
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Five9 can support FERPA-aware deployments with security and governance controls designed to protect sensitive data and manage access appropriately. For higher education teams, that means student information can be handled within a platform built with controls for access, auditability and data protection. The exact configuration should still align with your institution’s own FERPA policies and compliance requirements.
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AI agents should only have access to the data and actions required for the task they’re configured to perform. Five9 AI Trust & Governance provides guardrails, autonomy controls and observability so organizations can define what an AI agent is allowed to access and do, then review how it operates.
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Yes. Five9 is designed to connect with the systems higher education teams already use rather than requiring them to replace the full stack first. The higher education campaign framework specifically calls out Banner and Blackboard alongside CRM integrations, and Five9 supports broader connectivity through integrations, APIs and its Fusion ecosystem.
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The AI agent’s scope should be defined before the interaction begins. Five9 AI Trust & Governance supports guardrails, autonomy controls and observability so institutions can set boundaries around what the AI agent can handle and when a person needs to step in.
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Five9 is built to help higher education teams prepare for predictable spikes in demand rather than staff every day for the busiest week of the year. Cloud-based capacity, AI agents for routine interactions and Workforce Management can all help a higher education contact centre handle more volume during admissions, financial aid and registration peaks. The higher education campaign framework specifically identifies “absorb spikes without scrambling” as a core education use case.
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Very well, by the customer’s own account. The University of Akron deployed a fully remote, cloud contact centre in just a couple of days when COVID-19 hit — moving its IT help desk and switchboard off premises over a single weekend, without new equipment delays.
Be ready when the semester gets hard.
Give students a clearer path through enrolment, financial aid and advising with a student engagement platform that connects AI, advisors and the systems your institution already uses.