Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth transforms customer service for its 25,000 students with Freshdesk

The Company

The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY) brings together the brightest minds of the next generation and offers them unique, intellectually challenging, and socially rewarding experiences. Since 1979, they have served over 1 million academically advanced students and their families.

Their programs are designed for students in grades 2-12 and deliver rigorous and exciting coursework led by attentive, world-class educators. Students can choose from hundreds of online courses or can attend on-campus summer programs at sites across the U.S. 

Problem

CTY had no ticketing system in place and used Outlook to handle all incoming queries from their 25,000 plus students.

Using Outlook, CTY agents had to individually open each email and manually respond to customers. Often, CTY customers were parents of the children attending the programs, so cross-collaboration needed to take place with other departments. However, since agents had no way to collaborate in real-time on tickets, they were forced to send even more emails leading to disorganization and lost time. Before long, there were multiple email threads about one customer issue, making it nearly impossible to keep track of everything.

“Previously, we were using Outlook for all our communication, which proved to be a nightmare if you had to go back and track something.” - Danielle Brookhart, Assistant Director of Customer Engagement.

Agents were forced to manually search through their inbox to find information about a customer. Many customers also had similar questions, but CTY lacked the tools to reuse replies or create canned responses.

At the end of the day, agents were stretched thin trying to keep up with the influx of queries and customers were frustrated by the long response times.

The Solution

CTY required a powerful support solution with robust email ticket management and automation capabilities to handle their high volume of queries.

With Freshdesk, CTY was able to create one centralized place for all customer queries. Agents could easily track, assign, and organize tickets, ensuring nothing fell through the cracks. CTY was also able to leverage Freshdesk’s powerful reporting capabilities to learn what topics were constantly coming up in order to create canned responses and automations around those specific topics/questions. Those canned responses and automations proved to be huge time savers and helped offload repetitive questions and tasks from agents, allowing them to focus on more complex issues instead.

The “Group Performance” and “Agent Performance” reports have also been incredibly helpful for CTY’s hybrid work model. Since supervisors and agents aren’t in the same place, CTY uses these reports to keep tabs on agents and ensure that customers are being responded to in a timely manner. It also gives CTY supervisors a look into how long it’s taking agents to respond to issues. CTY leverages this information to continually improve their customer service.

Additionally, Freshdesk has made cross-collaboration a breeze. If an agent needs to collaborate with another team on a ticket, they can easily do so with private notes directly on the ticket using Freshconnect. Now, all information regarding a customer is stored in one place, so there’s always a clear record of all customer information in case an agent ever needs to go back and reference the notes.

CTY has also started to use Freshdesk to keep track of their outreach to students. Using the system, they are easily able to create tickets, track conversations and responses, and utilize tags for appropriate follow up. 

The Benefits

Today, CTY has 23 different groups in Freshdesk and about 100 full-time agents and 50 occasional users that use the email ticketing system to manage communication with families. 

With Freshdesk, they’ve cut their response time in half and are able to seamlessly collaborate with different teams and departments to get customers answers sooner. CTY also leverages Freshdesk’s knowledge base and self service to help customers/parents find answers to questions themselves through their FAQ section. Parents are happier because they receive immediate responses and agents are less overwhelmed because they don’t have to constantly answer repetitive questions and instead can focus on higher-value activities.

Freshdesk has been a game changer for CTY and they are looking to continue to expand their offerings. CTY plans to start using Freshchat to allow families more digital channels to reach their support staff, such as SMS, WhatsApp and more. With Freshchat, they plan to set up a chatbot to answer common questions and tie it to their knowledge base to give parents immediate answers to their FAQs, while also giving the option to triage to a live agent if needed. 

“For us, the biggest benefits, thus far, with Freshdesk have been the ability to organize our tickets and have the documentation to be able to keep track of everything. The reporting features of the agents that are producing and what topics are trending has also been incredibly helpful.” - Danielle Brookhart, Assistant Director of Customer Engagement.