El Camino College, a community college in South Bay, southern California, with over 20,000 students, caters to everyone from high-school leavers to the local retirement community. Keeping in touch with this broad group of people was a challenge until Gecko came along.
We spoke with Breeanna Bond, the Contact Center Coordinator at El Camino College, to find out exactly how Gecko transformed the college’s recruitment and retention program and achieved so much more than was ever expected of it. “When I was initially asked to start a call center for El Camino I thought I was going to have to build scripts on Excel spreadsheets, which is not something that I enjoy,” explains Breeanna. “Then Gecko was brought to our attention by one of our rival colleges who highly recommended it and that changed everything.” The college’s call center was launched in 2022 with Gecko and without Breeanna’s nemesis, Excel.
“We started by only making outbound calls and we focused on specific outreach and school relations campaigns to get people to come to campus and complete the enrollment process,” she reveals. “So, the call would go something like this, ‘Hey, I see you started an application and didn’t finish it, do you need any help with it, can I send you some more information?’ Or, ‘By the way, did you know you’re eligible for a scholarship?’
“Or, ‘I see you applied. We have orientation coming up.’ And as the orientation forms are in Gecko, we are able to sign them up while we’re on the phone with them.”
Gecko then began to be used for so much more than calls, as the college recognized how useful the broadcast, texts and emails facility was too. “First, we were called the call center,” says Breeanna, “but then we changed our name to the contact center because we were doing so much more than just making calls.”
Phone calls are particularly successful with focused campaigns, too. “One big campaign that I love doing every semester is scholarships. I go to institutional research and ask for a list of all those eligible to apply for scholarships and call them. A lot of them don’t even realize that they are eligible for a scholarship and those phone calls are generating more scholarship applicants than we’ve had in years, all from a phone call. Phone calls are more impactful than you realize,” adds Breeanna.
Calls are followed up with texts. Over half a million texts were sent by the college in the school year 2023 to 2024 and for this year, the college is up to 2.5 million texts. “That physical call makes a big difference and we follow up with a personal text or email and make a lot of connections,” says Breeanna.
Gecko helps El Camino combat fraud
Californian community colleges have a problem with fraudulent enrollments where ‘ghost students’ apply to colleges to steal financial aid. “To try to combat fraudulent applications, we can not give out any personal information over the phone and we focus on directing people to the departments they need to speak to,” says Breeanna. “Using Gecko, we can then text students specific links, so instead of trying to say ‘go to HTTP slash, slash’ we can just send them the link via a Gecko form, so it’s very helpful when it lets us follow up with further information by email or text.”
Training on Gecko is largely intuitive
Breeanna now has a small team supporting her in the contact center, many of them student workers and she says that all she needs to do is show them the basic workings of the platform and then it’s all pretty intuitive. “I’m actually learning tips and tricks from them now, as you find out more functionality the more you use Gecko. They quickly pick up how to build scripts, workflows and templates and clone everything so that it can be easily repeated,” says Breeanna. “It means I can focus on other things, which is great.”
Gecko was recommended to El Camino by a neighbouring community college. Now Breeanna is busy recommending the system herself. She has this advice for those just starting out on their Gecko journey: “If you want to build a strong campaign with Gecko, spend some time setting up workflows and templates that let you call, then send a text or email to sign up for an event. That little bit of time is so worth it. You can make thousands of calls with that one workflow. I always say to people, give Gecko 20 minutes and it’s all set up for a million calls.”
Gecko has made event management for El Camino College much easier, too. Prior to Gecko, there were two main data points surrounding events: the number of people invited and the number of people who attended. “With Gecko workflows, I can now create event campaigns, which list people as invited, accepted and attended. I can send out event reminders and I can generate yield rates that show how many people were invited, how many RSVPed and how many showed up,” says Breeanna. “We’re lucky if half of the 1,000 people invited RSVP and from this we normally find around 60% attend.”
The success of these workflows has encouraged other departments to use Gecko for events too. “Gecko forms are now used for counselling appointments, financial aid and orientations, for example. I can build a form for them in like 20 minutes, then it just needs to be plugged in and it can be used again and again,” says Breeanna.
Now the El Camino contact center fields calls for multiple departments. “Our one Gecko line is kind of interesting,” laughs Breeanna, ”it’s our contact center, our outreach line, our texting number, our call forwarding number from another department. It keeps us busy. Last week, I sent out like 21,000 texts detailing registration appointment times.”
Calling from a single number also creates a sense of familiarity and trust with students. “The combination of voicemails, texts and phone calls coming from the same number makes it easy for students to call us back without having to search out a number. Because people recognize our number, it’s helped our pickup rate too.”
Gecko proves it’s not the end of the line for phone communication
Young people are often seen to shun live phone conversation, preferring to communicate via messages and voice notes, but El Camino’s experience with Gecko proves that phone calls still have an important role to play in communication, with an almost 50% answer rate. And, Breeanna has noticed that Apple’s latest update, which transcribes voice messages live, is also boosting call pickup. She says: “It’s like listening to an old style answer machine message, because quite often we’re in the middle of a message and when they see it’s El Camino they pick up, which helps us to close the loop a lot quicker and we don’t have to wait for as many call backs.”
Ready to see similar results at your institution?
El Camino College went from managing scattered communications to making half a million calls annually with a 55% answer rate. Book a demo to discover how Gecko’s Cloud Call Center could transform your student engagement strategy.
