A Legacy of Opening Doors to Education
Coppin State University has been changing lives for 125 years. This historically black institution sits right in the heart of Baltimore, serving students from 17 to 65 years old. They work to foster leadership, social responsibility, civic and community engagement, cultural diversity and inclusion, as well as economic development. Every day brings new stories of transformation.
“Here at Coppin our vision is to become a leader in urban education,” says Annie Torres, Director of IT Learning and Innovation. “We want to be recognized nationally for what we do every day, and that’s providing opportunities for students across all socioeconomical statuses.”
Their approach has led to remarkable growth. Over the past five to six years, Coppin has experienced what Dr. Dionne Curbeam, university CIO, calls “a renaissance,” with growth in student populations, athletic opportunities, and academic programs.
But even the strongest mission can be derailed by communication failures as Dr. Curbeam witnessed firsthand during student recruitment.
When Communication Breaks Down
“Several years ago when we were processing students, one of the gaps that we noticed was in admissions. A student would get their admission, but sometimes we would not effectively communicate with them for months,” she recalls. “By that time, they had been courted by other universities, thought Coppin had forgotten about them, and moved on.”
Emmanuel Osuowu, Director of IT Operations and Quality Assurance, also knows this pain. He’s spent 36 years at Coppin State, watching technology either help or hurt their mission.
“The latest challenge that we had was dropping calls,” Emmanuel explains. “And we had no way of knowing who called or when they called. Giving the help people need when they call is a big part of providing opportunities for everyone.”
Annie faced her own frustration from the training side. Her team juggled multiple systems that didn’t talk to each other.
“The biggest pain point was the lack of integration,” Annie recalls. “Since we’re powered with Teams, we need our tools to work with Teams, which our previous system didn’t do.”
Finding Technology to Support the Mission
“We are a Microsoft 365 campus, so Teams is a big part of our day-to-day work,” Annie explains. “Choosing Landis Contact Center for its seamless integration with Teams was very important. We don’t want to frustrate our faculty, staff, and students by having to deal with systems that don’t talk to each other.”
They needed visibility and integration. A system that would work with their existing tools and show them what was happening with every call.
New Visibility and Better Data
“I am really impressed with the Landis dashboards,” Dr. Curbeam notes. “When I look at them, I’m able to see who my top callers are and where their pain points are. That helps us to be able to identify what types of gaps exist and how we can provide the resources and tools.”
This data enables better staffing decisions than before. “If we look at the data and see that there’s a peak call volume on Tuesdays between 12:00 and 3:00 PM but we also notice that that’s when the fewest agents are available to answer calls, we can make sure that we’re staffed more on that day,” says Dr Curbeam.
“We also no longer worry about calls going unanswered,” Emmanuel explained. “If one person is not available, it rolls over to another one of the staff.”
And the visibility they had been missing is now available. “With the old system, when we missed a call, we might not even know why” he explains. “Now I can navigate to the reports and see all the calls that have come in, how long the caller waited, and I can call them back.”
“The training and onboarding process has been great,” Annie shares. “And I have had an opportunity to delve into some features that I’m really excited about.”
The go-live day turned into a celebration, Annie said. “We celebrated adding a tool that integrated with our current stack and made our job so much easier.”
Read how ImageTrend gained better visibility into contact center data.
Strategies for Student Success
“Now moving forward with Landis, we can look at how to design some SLAs for metrics like call answer times. We are now able, for example, to introduce post call surveys to measure satisfaction,” Dr. Curbeam explains. “If we see that people are on hold for long periods of time, we can ask if this means that they’re asking deeper questions or maybe we just need to triage a little differently.”
Impact on the Mission
Today, Coppin State can serve every student who calls. Every voice gets heard. Their communication technology finally supports their mission of opening doors for students from all walks of life.
“Communication is very, very essential in making sure that we collaborate, move forward, make progress, and build inclusion into our programs and our mission. Communication is how we share our values,” Dr Curbeam reflects.
As Coppin continues to grow, they now have the communication tools and insights to ensure that no student is left behind.
Ready to transform your institution’s communication the way Coppin State did? Book a demo of Landis Contact Center to see how a Microsoft Teams native contact center can help.
