Managed services
Steadier student support and stable IT across a busy academic year
An English further-education provider struggled with enrolment-season support spikes and unreliable IT. A managed service steadied both across the year.
Results at a glance
- -73%
- Enrolment wait time
- +34 pts
- IT resolved in target
- -58%
- Abandoned enrolments
- -46%
- Repeat outages
11 to 3 minutes
SLA attainment
The challenge
Every September the provider was overwhelmed as thousands of students enrolled at once, and its small in-house team could not answer the surge of finance, timetable and access queries. Wait times ran long and some students dropped out of the process entirely.
Campus IT was reactive and understaffed, so classroom outages and login failures went unresolved for hours. Leadership wanted predictable service across teaching and enrolment periods without hiring for the peak and carrying the cost through quieter months.
Pain points
- Enrolment-season query volumes far beyond what the in-house desk could absorb
- Long student wait times and abandoned enrolments during the September peak
- Classroom and login outages left unresolved for hours with no clear ownership
- Fixed staffing costs that did not flex with the academic calendar
Our approach
- Stood up a managed student support desk that scaled up for enrolment and down for term time
- Took ownership of first-line and second-line IT with defined response and resolution targets
- Built a shared knowledge base so students got consistent answers across phone, email and chat
- Data handled under UK GDPR with a Data Processing Agreement and safeguarding-aware handling of student records
Results at a glance
The results
- Average student wait time during enrolment fell from eleven minutes to under three.
- IT tickets were resolved within target far more often, and repeat outages dropped as root causes were fixed.
- The provider paid for capacity that matched demand, avoiding a permanent team sized for two peak weeks.
Enrolment used to be two weeks of firefighting. This year the desk held up and my staff could actually help the students in front of them.
Common questions
Yes. The desk scales up for enrolment and clearing and scales back for quieter term-time weeks, so you pay for capacity that matches demand.
These are representative engagements. Client identities are anonymised and the metrics are illustrative of the type of results this work delivers, not audited figures for a named client.
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