Western Governors University’s story
Improved resolution rates and boosted community knowledge center CSAT scores are just a few of the numerous positive results Western Governors University (WGU) has enjoyed from leveraging Khoros Communities.
About Western Governors University
WGU is an online university for the 21st century. The university is driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs. Since its establishment in 1997, WGU has grown into a national university, serving more than 120,000 students from 50 states. The university continues to open doors for adult learners who need flexibility to achieve their education and career goals. WGU’s innovative competency-based academic approach makes it possible, allowing individuals to fit their education into their lives, not the other way around.
Reasons for change
In 2015, WGU was looking to create a space where students enrolled in specific courses could easily communicate with faculty and their peers. Khoros Communities was brought on board to address this challenge, but the team quickly realized that their need for setting strict permissioning and access was not the best use case for the solution.
Kerrie Thometz, Senior Knowledge Specialist at WGU, joined the team shortly after the decision-making process. She saw an opportunity to leverage the Khoros Communities solution to support the team’s other critical goals. These included updating, maintaining, and sharing the university’s frequently evolving policy resources as well as providing an easy-to-use platform for students to locate content in a self-service manner.
Solution
While many traditional brick-and-mortar universities follow a semester schedule with regular breaks in between student enrollment, WGU operates a bit differently. WGU is a strictly online university, which allows students to start classwork every month on 6-month terms. While traditional universities can use those breaks to update policies less frequently, the university’s unique structure requires constant evolution of its policies. WGU required an easy-to-use method to track versions, update formatting, and adjust permissioning, roles, and access to these policies. Khoros Communities provided the team with the permissioning rules and single-sign-on capabilities they needed to support this goal.
Previously, Thometz and team were using a knowledge-based tool to manage content. The tool lacked the ability to publicize content without it being routed to a webpage. This caused them to lose analytics on this content. Now with the community experience survey capability of Khoros Communities, Thometz gained visibility into key metrics around content usage, including who was logged in and who wasn’t, number of views, number of visitors, and the knowledge base ratings. These insights can help steer future content improvements and enhancements.
Being an online school without physical campuses, tech is not only how WGU helps people work toward and gain their degrees, it's also how they communicate. Important administrative questions around payment plans and financial aid would frequently make their way to the university by means of phone calls. Khoros Communities has helped reduce call volume and increase cost deflection through self-service content.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
“We use Khoros for group hubs to form our first student clubs. We have our cyber security club, cyber security alumni club, women in tech space, and a handful of other clubs. We hadn’t done that yet as an institution.”
Kerrie Thometz
Senior Knowledge Specialist at Western Governors University
“I think our biggest success is the community experience survey. Using that tool, we can track our resolution rate, which is consistently over 85. We didn’t have that data before. There weren’t any mechanisms in place to measure that before, so that in itself is an improvement of moving to this tool.”
Kerrie Thometz
Senior Knowledge Specialist at Western Governors University
“We look at the search report that Khoros provides. We’re able to see what we’re missing, and that is helpful. We didn’t have that before. We didn’t have anything that would show what people are looking for, if they did or did not get results. I use that to find opportunities for additional content to be created.”
Kerrie Thometz
Senior Knowledge Specialist at Western Governors University
“With other tools we’ve used, if you get rid of an article or change it, the link breaks. With Khoros, links don’t break when you move stuff around in the space and archive things. Our biggest challenge is how quickly things change. That’s been one of the main things that has been very useful with our constant change and innovation. You’re not going to hit a dead end, even if that content is changed.”
Kerrie Thometz
Senior Knowledge Specialist at Western Governors University
Top achievements
Kerrie Thometz and her team can utilize Khoros Communities to provide the right content to the right students on-demand in an online, self-service capacity, without students needing to contact the university via a phone call.
By leveraging group hubs, WGU launched online student clubs to bring students of common interest areas together to be able to connect and collaborate.
A combination of the community experience surveys, search reports, and audit logs has helped Thometz gain valuable content usage insights to inform future improvements and enhancements.
Early results
Enhanced academic experience
Boosted resolution rate
Increased CSAT score
Improved visibility
What's next
To further enhance students’ abilities to self-serve and locate the content they’re looking for, WGU is considering providing an AI-based virtual assistant feature. This feature is intended to allow students to ask the questions they’re seeking answers to in the student portal without needing to search for them.