Clearing represents a high-pressure period for staff and students – it’s never too early to start preparing

Regardless of the outcome, receiving A-level results is a nerve-wracking moment for most students. For the thousands each year were unable to secure a place at university through the regular application process, however, these results are just the first step on a critical and high-pressure journey through university clearing. These students are faced with inserting themselves into an unfamiliar system and operating on a tight timeframe – contacting their universities of choice, all the while knowing that hundreds of others are doing the same in order to secure a limited number of places.

Naturally, this high-pressure environment doesn’t only exist on the student side of things. When the lines open on the first Thursday of the clearing period, it’s not unusual for record numbers of calls to be made to universities – and if they aren’t able to handle this influx, they face losing out on prospective students while suffering increased pressures and stress on both callers and staff. This is old news for institutions that tackle the clearing period every year, but with new trends in both technology and behaviour becoming apparent, we’re also seeing the emergence of new challenges and opportunities. Through proactive collaboration with technology partners, and the smart leveraging of the technologies available, universities can ensure they’re prepared for the traditional rush of phone calls, while also catering to those who might otherwise be overlooked or slip through the cracks.

Each new generation of students brings with it an evolving attitude to communication – something that has perhaps never been more apparent than over the last decade. We live in a world where practically every young person has a smartphone, but where nearly two-thirds of them would rather avoid phone calls in favour of other methods. For clearing, where voice calls have been the primary method of communication for decades, serious consideration is needed to avoid missing students who simply don’t communicate in the ways their predecessors did. One approach to tackling this issue is to employ the digital channel capabilities of solutions such as Webex Contact Center (WxCC); by allowing prospective students to contact them through apps like WhatsApp, universities can offer a method of communication that’s low-pressure and more familiar to users that may not be comfortable making a phone call.

Serving students through these additional channels doesn’t necessarily have a major impact on demands for agents’ time, either. Due to the asynchronous nature of communication channels like WhatsApp, contact centre agents can process multiple conversations concurrently, improving efficiency for the staff and response times for the students. When used alongside traditional voice options, this can lead to record numbers of enquiries being processed – as we saw in our work with Coventry University in 2023, where the university reported its highest number of clearing conversations for five years.

This efficiency and responsiveness is critical for universities during clearing, as tight timeframes mean that a slow response or frustrating process can cause students to give up and try elsewhere. It’s this same goal that has meant that many universities regularly bring in additional staff – either from elsewhere in the university, or from outside the institution – to staff their contact centres during the period.

This temporary staffing-up is still a vital component in the successful handling of clearing for many universities, with the numbers of contact centre agents commonly swelling to three times their off-peak total. For this reason, institutions need to ensure well ahead of time that they won’t end up bearing the cost of the necessary additional software license fees year-round. WxCC provides flexible licensing, allowing universities to leverage license overages and avoid committing to the full number of licenses for the entire year – instead only paying for the increase in licenses during the period in which they are used. At the same time, increasing numbers of staff can often introduce unexpected bottlenecks elsewhere in the chain. To help alleviate this, the system in place also has to be resilient, reliable, and easy to use so that the staff that have been brought in can get up to speed quickly and work effectively.

Beyond the software solution that the university has at its disposal, our time supporting universities through clearing has shown again and again the value of engaging early with a technology partner around your specific requirements. By collaborating with universities well in advance of the clearing period, we’ve been able to provide advice and consult on not just the specifics of the clearing period, but broader best practices and use of technology that provide benefits to the wider institution. Comprehensive testing and preparations in the run-up to clearing is also vital, including the creation of backups and failover scenarios to ensure that, regardless of what happens on the day, students’ calls get through.

Finally, after clearing has closed and the dust has settled, it’s important that universities are left with actionable data and insights into their performance, so that they can not only review call volumes and demands, but analyse traffic flow and confidently identify any bottlenecks in the process, ensuring that the next year’s clearing can progress more smoothly, and yield even better results.

Elena Pudge is the Collaboration Practice Lead at ITGL. Her work at ITGL has included the support of multiple different universities through the clearing period, including most recently the University of Portsmouth. The university’s early engagements over the last three years have allowed them to enter into clearing on the best possible footing and complete the period with no significant issues.