How LA Pacific University drives enrollment with Dialpad Ai

Ever thought of returning to school, but wondered how it’ll work as a busy working professional? As one of the nation’s most affordable universities, Los Angeles Pacific University (LAPU) focuses on helping working adults—and those with families—sharpen their skills while juggling various other responsibilities.

How do they do it? By offering online, flexible and competitively priced programs that fit your life. As you can imagine, having a reliable, simplified, yet feature-packed communications platform is key to LAPU’s operational success.

However, their existing telephony systems weren’t cutting it anymore. Not only did they require lots of manual work to set up and manage, but they also heavily relied on in-house IT resources.

Daniel Terrones, Director of Information Technology at LAPU, knew it was time for a better communication system that freed up their resources—instead of draining them.

Freeing up resources with one unified communications system

Before, LAPU had gone through three to four other telephony systems. Because they were using multiple telephony systems, the experience for LAPU’s team was disjointed and disorganized.

Dialpad came out tops for several reasons: “Dialpad stood out because they provide platform maintenance and quick support on things like reporting,” says Daniel. Before, LAPU’s telephony systems were problematic as their IT team had to do a lot of manual work to set up IVR and reports, and manage the systems. “With Dialpad, we only need one full-time team member to manage our communication platform, compared to an entire team before.”

“We also don’t have to develop enhancement features in-house,” says Daniel. “Dialpad does all the heavy lifting with developing features.” This means that now, Daniel’s team can focus on other important tasks.

More empowered agents and lower call audit times with Dialpad Ai

As an organization that needs high call connection rates to drive student enrollment, LAPU’s enrollment team makes anywhere from 50 to 100 calls per day. This means agent efficiency is critical. With Dialpad’s AI-powered RTA (Real-Time Assist) cards, the team can get new agents up and running right away. Even more experienced agents will no longer have to do a ton of manual research on less frequently discussed LAPU programs, since these call pops come up on their screens automatically with helpful information:

“We have to prep for about 15 minutes before each call, so RTAs (Real-Time Assists) would be helpful to quickly provide agents with more context for our programs, which saves each enrollment counselor a lot of time,” says Daniel.

If enrollment counselors happen to need help with a call, department managers can use call barging to interrupt a call to help them take over the call. All managers have to do is click on “Barge Call” when the time’s right.

LAPU’s enrollment team also uses real-time voice transcriptions to quickly and easily audit calls, especially for escalated calls:

“Our team can quickly search words in the call transcripts, instead of manually having to go through call recordings, listen to the calls, and pull up notes for the particular call,” says Daniel. “Now, they can just pull up the transcript and quickly find what they’re looking for.”

For a team that makes about 22,000 calls in a month, they now only take a few minutes to audit calls, compared to 20 minutes before.

To give LAPU’s enrollment team even more support, department managers use Coaching Teams in Dialpad Sell to segment and train their team on a more granular level. “Coaching Teams fits our training and QA model very well,” says Daniel. “It helps our managerial team record and organize their coaching program.”

Streamlining agent workflows with the Dialpad + Salesforce integration

Because the LAPU enrollment team works out of Salesforce every day, being able to do all their work in one place without switching between multiple windows makes life a lot easier. With the Dialpad + Salesforce integration, they can make calls right from Salesforce, where they’re also automatically logged. “We love that these features came out of the box with Dialpad,” says Daniel:

With 22,000 outbound calls per month, there’s an incredibly large number of opportunities to capture valuable conversational intelligence (like the call purpose and details), which is critical for helping the team analyze enrollment pipelines and student cycles.

“We heavily use call dispositions and we like that we can automatically log those in Salesforce, so our agents don’t have to do extra manual work,” says Daniel. “This saves us a lot of time because we can create reports on what types of calls we’re having and dig into them further. Before, we had to report everything out of our telephony system, which wasn’t connected to our student records.”

Since LAPU’s busy working students don’t often have time to take calls during the day, LAPU’s team can still communicate with students with Dialpad’s business text messaging:

“Texting is one of the best ways to connect with our students,” says Daniel. “We can also leave a voice note, instead of a voicemail.”

Up next: Post-call summaries, Custom Moments, and power dialer

With more empowered agents, better coaching programs, and more streamlined agent workflows, LAPU’s enrollment agents can serve their students more quickly and effectively.

Now that LAPU’s team is enjoying the many features of Dialpad Ai, they’re looking to unlock post-call summaries and power dialer to free up even more of their agents’ time. They also have their eye on Custom Moments for deeper call insights and coaching opportunities.

We can’t wait to see how LAPU continues to serve students better and improve agents’ lives with Dialpad!