Unigo is an online business matching students with colleges, scholarships, internships, student loans, majors and careers. According to USA Today , “millions of students use Unigo to assist in their college search.” Education publisher McGraw-Hill wrote “Unigo is the largest and most authoritative library of college reviews on the internet.”
40-493: In 2014, the firm was acquired by EDPlus Holdings, LLC. In July 2016, EDPlus Holdings soldUnigo.com, along with EStudentLoan.com, to Education Dynamics . Unigo.com includes 650,000 college reviews, 3.6 million scholarships, 90,000 internships and 3.3 million study materials, as well as a marketplace of 20,000 academic tutors, professional college counselors and online courses. The site has 2 million registered users and receives 14 million unique visitors per year. At B2e.unigo.com,
80-546: A log-normal service time distribution . Simulation algorithms are increasingly being used to model call arrival, queueing and service levels. Call centre operations have been supported by mathematical models beyond queueing, with operations research , which considers a wide range of optimisation problems seeking to reduce waiting times while keeping server utilisation and therefore efficiency high. Call centres have received criticism for low rates of pay and restrictive working practices for employees, which have been deemed as
120-461: A boutique provider of marketing and bundled Enrollment Management Services. In 2019, it purchased the digital marketing , search engine optimization , and call center businesses of Thruline, a higher education marketing agency based in Lenexa, Kansas. In 2019, NBC News reported that Education Dynamics was targeting military veterans through Military-colleges.com. In 2020, the firm purchased
160-1078: A company using analytics to improve student persistence. EducationDynamics announced in October, 2021 that it had been purchased by Renovus Capital Partners. EducationDynamics is led by Bruce Douglas, who has served as CEO since 2015 and previously held the role of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Prior to Douglas, the company was led by Tom Anderson. The company focuses on delivering marketing and related enrollment/student engagement support services for online and adult-focused college programs. The firm's multi-channel marketing services include search engine optimization (SEO), digital marketing, Over-the-Top (OTT) marketing, awareness media and creative services. It provides coaching services for prospective students and for student success. It manages multiple inquiry generation websites, including gradschools.com, schools.com, elearners.com, and educationconnection.com. The company also conducts primary and secondary research on behalf of clients and releases numerous annual reports, including
200-501: A corporate computer network , including mainframes , microcomputer, servers and LANs . It is expected that artificial intelligence -based chatbots will significantly impact call centre jobs and will increase productivity substantially. Many organisations have already adopted AI-based chatbots to improve their customer service experience. The contact center is a central point from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centers, valuable information can be routed to
240-404: A dehumanising environment. Other research illustrates how call centre workers develop ways to counter or resist this environment by integrating local cultural sensibilities or embracing a vision of a new life. Most call centres provide electronic reports that outline performance metrics, quarterly highlights and other information about the calls made and received. This has the benefit of helping
280-863: A leading market research firm focused exclusively on understanding adult, non-traditional, and online college students through primary and secondary research. Aslanian Market Research was founded by Carol Aslanian, who continues to lead the market research solutions offered by EducationDynamics. In 2010, it acquired Education Connection; in 2011, the Education Connection website reportedly had 350 colleges paying for leads, with 300,000 unique visitors per month and 40,000 signing up for help. In 2015, Halyard Capital sold EducationDynamics to an investor group including Muirlands Capital, KnowledgeShares and Prudential Capital Group. In 2016, EducationDynamics acquired EdPlus Holdings, which included Unigo .com and EStudentLoan.com. In 2018 it acquired JMH Consulting, Inc,
320-479: A mechanical answering machine. Although undoubtedly more costly (the human service, the cost of setting up and paying the phone company for the OPX on a monthly basis), it had the advantage of being more ready to respond to the unique needs of after-hours callers. The answering service operators also had the option of calling the client and alerting them to particularly important calls. The origins of call centers date back to
360-466: A particular focus on adult online education . It also partners with private lenders who provide student loans , produces marketing research about adult online students, and hosts the InsightsEDU Conference, formerly known as (CALEM). As a member of BMO Financial Group and Halyard Capital, the company was founded in 2005 as Halyard Education Partners . The company's first inquiry portal
400-404: A sale per lead. The universal queue standardises the processing of communications across multiple technologies such as fax, phone, and email. The virtual queue provides callers with an alternative to waiting on hold when no agents are available to handle inbound call demand. Historically call centres have been built on Private branch exchange (PBX) equipment owned, hosted, and maintained by
440-556: A separate application, and configuration APIs which enable graphical user interface (GUI) controls of administrative functions. Outsourced call centres are often located in developing countries , where wages are significantly lower than in western countries with higher minimum wages. These include the call centre industries in the Philippines , Bangladesh , and India . Companies that regularly utilise outsourced contact centre services include British Sky Broadcasting and Orange in
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#1732849015849480-528: A traditional, centralised, call centre location, which increasingly allows people 'on the go' or with physical or other disabilities to work from desired locations – i.e. not leaving their house. The only required equipment is Internet access, a workstation, and a softphone. If the virtual call centre software utilizes webRTC , a softphone is not required to dial. The companies are preferring Virtual Call Centre services due to cost advantage. Companies can start their call centre business immediately without installing
520-578: Is a further extension of call centres telephony based capabilities, administers centralised handling of individual communications, including letters , faxes , live support software , social media , instant message , and email . A call center was previously seen as an open workspace for call center agents , with workstations that included a computer and display for each agent and were connected to an inbound/outbound call management system, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centers, often linked to
560-551: Is a managed capability that can be centralised or remote that is used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of enquiries by telephone . An inbound call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product or service support or information inquiries from consumers. Outbound call centres are usually operated for sales purposes such as telemarketing , for solicitation of charitable or political donations , debt collection , market research , emergency notifications, and urgent/critical needs blood banks . A contact centre
600-478: Is also intended to improve efficiencies, both for inbound and outbound campaigns. This allows inbound calls to be directly routed to the appropriate agent for the task, whilst minimising wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in. For outbound calls, lead selection allows management to designate what type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socioeconomic factors, past performance, and percentage likelihood of closing
640-746: The Communications Workers of America and the United Steelworkers . In Australia , the National Union of Workers represents unionised workers; their activities form part of the Australian labour movement . In Europe , UNI Global Union of Switzerland is involved in assisting unionisation in the call center industry, and in Germany Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft represents call centre workers. During
680-485: The Hilton Hotels Corporation and Marriott International make use of call centres to manage reservations. These are known in the industry as "central reservations offices". Staff members at these call centres take calls from clients wishing to make reservations or other inquiries via a public number, usually a 1-800 number . These centres may operate as many as 24 hours per day, seven days a week, depending on
720-459: The Quinstreet higher education vertical, which included onlinedegrees.com, and schools.com. In September 2020, it also received capital infusions of $ 80 million from Whitehorse Capital and $ 12.5 million from Encina Business Credit. In November, 2020 the company announced the acquisition of the higher education portal classesUSA. In 2021, it announced a strategic relationship with Nuro Retention,
760-489: The 1960s through the 1980s, earlier and slightly later, involved a business that specifically provided the service. Primarily, by using an off-premises extension (OPX) for each subscribing business, connected at a switchboard at the answering service business, the answering service would answer the otherwise unattended phones of the subscribing businesses with a live operator. The live operator could take messages or relay information, doing so with greater human interactivity than
800-527: The 1960s with the UK-based Birmingham Press and Mail, which installed Private Automated Business Exchanges (PABX) to have rows of agents handling customer contacts. By 1973, call centers had received mainstream attention after Rockwell International patented its Galaxy Automatic Call Distributor (GACD) for a telephone booking system as well as the popularization of telephone headsets as seen on televised NASA Mission Control Center events. During
840-401: The 1990s, call centres expanded internationally and developed into two additional subsets of communication: contact centres and outsourced bureau centres. A contact centre is a coordinated system of people, processes, technologies, and strategies that provides access to information, resources, and expertise, through appropriate channels of communication, enabling interactions that create value for
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#1732849015849880-426: The 2021 conference. InsightsEDU offers higher ed leaders the opportunity to come together and discuss the latest trends and insights on attracting and engaging career-focused non-traditional students. The conference offers three tracks: Marketing, Enrollment Management, and Leadership. Call center A call centre ( Commonwealth spelling ) or call center ( American spelling ; see spelling differences )
920-622: The Association of Educational Publishers, the Viacom Foundation and The White House. Unigo reaches more than 50% of all college-bound students and provides services to approximately 9 million consumers each year. Education Dynamics EducationDynamics (EDDY) is a privately held higher education management corporation. Founded in 2005, the firm provides market research, advertising agency, multichannel marketing , lead generation , and enrollment management for over 500 US colleges with
960-679: The Online College Students Report, Higher Ed Landscape Report and Enrollment Management Benchmarks Report. Unigo is a leading student search and scholarship site, acquired by EducationDynamics in 2016. Unigo owns the student loan marketplace estudentloan.com and provides student loan information for Bankrate.com. Unigo Student Funding partners with colleges to originate and service student loans. EducationDynamics produces research and reports about online adult education, with information on marketing trends, consumer demand, industry changes, and student retention. The reports include
1000-485: The annual Online College Students Report, and 2020 & Beyond Student Survey and Report. The Online College Students Report was part of a joint effort between EducationDynamics and Wiley Education Services(a subsidiary of John Wiley and Sons ) . EducationDynamics hosts the annual InsightsEDU conference. The conference was previously known as the Conference on Adult Learner Enrollment Management and changed names after
1040-487: The appropriate people or systems, contacts can be tracked, and data may be gathered. It is generally a part of the company's customer relationship management infrastructure. The majority of large companies use contact centers as a means of managing their customer interactions. These centers can be operated by either an in-house department responsible or outsourcing customer interaction to a third-party agency (known as Outsourcing Call Centres ). Answering services, as known in
1080-798: The basic infrastructure like Dialer , ACD and IVRS . Virtual call centres became increasingly used after the COVID-19 pandemic restricted businesses from operating with large groups of people working in close proximity. Through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs), hosted and on-demand call centres that are built on cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) platforms can integrate their functionality with cloud-based applications for customer relationship management (CRM), lead management and more. Developers use APIs to enhance cloud-based call centre platform functionality—including Computer telephony integration (CTI) APIs which provide basic telephony controls and sophisticated call handling from
1120-512: The brand WSJ On Campus with The Wall Street Journal and created the 152-page print title "The USA Today / Unigo College Guide " with USA Today . The firm also created high schools curriculum and tutoring services with McGraw-Hill Education. Unigo's investors include The Wall Street Journal, McGraw-Hill Ventures and Aequitas Capital . The company has been awarded education grants by Facebook, The Gates Foundation and The NYC Board of Education. It has received recognitions from The Webby Awards,
1160-413: The call centre operator. The PBX can provide functions such as automatic call distribution , interactive voice response , and skills-based routing . In a virtual call centre model, the call centre operator (business) pays a monthly or annual fee to a vendor that hosts the call centre telephony and data equipment in their own facility, cloud-based. In this model, the operator does not own, operate or host
1200-575: The call volume the chain receives. Queueing theory is a branch of mathematics in which models of service systems have been developed. A call centre can be seen as a queueing network and results from queueing theory such as the probability an arriving customer needs to wait before starting service useful for provisioning capacity. ( Erlang's C formula is such a result for an M/M/c queue and approximations exist for an M/G/k queue .) Statistical analysis of call centre data has suggested arrivals are governed by an inhomogeneous Poisson process and jobs have
1240-401: The company to plan the workload and time of its employees. However, it has also been argued that such close monitoring breaches the human right to privacy . Complaints are often logged by callers who find the staff do not have enough skill or authority to resolve problems, as well as appearing apathetic. These concerns are due to a business process that exhibits levels of variability because
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1280-1211: The customer and organization. In contrast to in-house management, outsourced bureau contact centres are a model of contact centre that provide services on a "pay per use" model. The overheads of the contact centre are shared by many clients, thereby supporting a very cost effective model, especially for low volumes of calls. The modern contact centre includes automated call blending of inbound and outbound calls as well as predictive dialing capabilities, dramatically increasing agents' productivity. New implementations of more complex systems require highly skilled operational and management staff that can use multichannel online and offline tools to improve customer interactions. Call centre technologies often include: speech recognition software which allowed Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems to handle first levels of customer support , text mining , natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training via interactive scripting and automatic mining using best practices from past interactions, support automation and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction . Automatic lead selection or lead steering
1320-524: The equipment on which the call centre runs. Agents connect to the vendor's equipment through traditional PSTN telephone lines, or over voice over IP . Calls to and from prospects or contacts originate from or terminate at the vendor's data centre, rather than at the call centre operator's premises. The vendor's telephony equipment (at times data servers) then connects the calls to the call centre operator's agents. Virtual call centre technology allows people to work from home or any other location instead of in
1360-519: The experience a customer gets and results a company achieves on a given call are dependent upon the quality of the agent. Call centres are beginning to address this by using agent-assisted automation to standardise the process all agents use. However, more popular alternatives are using personality and skill based approaches. The various challenges encountered by call operators are discussed by several authors. Call centres located in India have been
1400-749: The firm provides enrollment and market research services to more than 50 colleges and universities. Unigo also owns and operates Cinergy Education, a firm providing n higher education marketing services. The firm also owns and operates PrepTalk and UnigoConnec, t that license technology to colleges for recruitment, student retention and alumni networking. Unigo owns the student loan marketplace estudentloan.com and provides student loan information for Bankrate.com. Unigo Student Funding partners with colleges to originate and service student loans. Unigo provides college information for many mainstream media brands including U.S. News & World Report, ABC News, Money Magazine and T he Huffington Post . Thefirm co-founded
1440-446: The focus of several documentary films, the 2004 film Thomas L. Friedman Reporting: The Other Side of Outsourcing , the 2005 films John and Jane , Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night , and 1-800-India: Importing a White-Collar Economy , and the 2006 film Bombay Calling , among others. An Indian call centre is also the subject of the 2006 film Outsourced and a key location in the 2008 film, Slumdog Millionaire . The 2014 BBC fly on
1480-674: The late 1970s, call center technology expanded to include telephone sales, airline reservations, and banking systems. The term "call center" was first published and recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1983. The 1980s saw the development of toll-free telephone numbers to increase the efficiency of agents and overall call volume. Call centers increased with the deregulation of long-distance calling and growth in information-dependent industries. As call centres expanded, workers in North America began to join unions such as
1520-765: The telecommunications industry, Adidas in the sports and leisure sector, Audi in car manufacturing and charities such as the RSPCA . The healthcare industry has and continues to use outbound call centre programmes for years to help manage billing, collections, and patient communication. The inbound call centre is a new and increasingly popular service for many types of healthcare facilities, including large hospitals. Inbound call centres can be outsourced or managed in-house. These healthcare call centres are designed to help streamline communications, enhance patient retention and satisfaction, reduce expenses and improve operational efficiencies. Many large hospitality companies such as
1560-569: The wall documentary series The Call Centre gave an often distorted although humorous view of life in a Welsh call centre. Appointment setting is a specialized function within call centres, where dedicated agents focus on facilitating and scheduling meetings between clients and businesses or sales representatives. This service is particularly prevalent in various industries such as financial services, healthcare, real estate, and B2B sales, where time-sensitive and personalized communications are essential for effective client engagement. Lead generation
1600-519: Was eLearners.com, which works to pair prospective students with colleges and universities offering online programs. In 2006, it acquired Educational Directories Unlimited, owners of StudyAbroad.com, GradSchools.com, and StudentProspector.com. That same year, the company launched a multi-platform US-based contact center. In 2007, it acquired WorldClass Strategy, owner of EarnMyDegree.com. The firm rebranded as Education Dynamics in 2007. In 2009, EducationDynamics acquired Aslanian Market Research,
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