How Rotterdam University offers fast student support with Trengo

For Rotterdam University (Hogeschool Rotterdam), accessibility is key. They want to answer their students' questions with lightning speed - both offline and online.

To make that happen, they integrated Trengo's live chat into their digital student platform, Mijn HR. Here, students can look up their class schedule, test results, overall progress, and more. And whenever they have questions, they can easily ask them via live chat.

At this moment, 12 different front offices of Rotterdam University work with Trengo. We asked online customer support advisor Vera Jansen and education advisor Mineke Goudswaard about their experiences.

How did you start using Trengo?
Vera: "During last year's lockdown, we found that our front offices weren't accessible enough via the internet. That's when we realised we really had to change something to make it easier for students to get in contact with us."

"During last year's lockdown, we found that our front offices weren't accessible enough via the internet."

What did you want to improve by using Trengo?
Mineke: "Back in 2018, I had already examined the live chat tool we were using back then. I quickly ran into many technical issues. For instance, a lot of questions by students got 'stuck' and didn't reach us. We first tried to solve the issues causing this, but eventually, we had to start looking for an alternative."

How are you using the live chat?
Mineke: "Trengo's live chat serves as the virtual counter of Rotterdam University. Having a conversation via live chat feels more comfortable to younger generations than via email or phone. It's informal, accessible, and gives our team the ability to answer questions quickly. My front office currently receives about 365 live chats a week."

"In Trengo, I discovered a lot of handy functionalities. For instance, the ability to put chats on hold has been really useful so far. With our previous solution, we could only run two chats at the same time."

"Besides that, we can now also manage questions that come in outside of business hours better. With Trengo's live chat, students can leave their email address so that we can get back to them the next morning."

Students can start a live chat right inside of your digital student platform. Can you explain how this works?
Vera: "Students spend a lot of time organizing things for their education besides studying, like finding an internship or picking a minor. All of these things need to be organised in a lot of different software tools.

This costs students a lot of time and energy that they should be able to spend on studying. That's why we have integrated all of these software solutions, including Trengo's live chat, into one digital student platform: Mijn HR.

"We have integrated all software solutions, including Trengo's live chat, into one digital student platform: Mijn HR."

"In Mijn HR, students can enrol themselves for exams, see which classes they need to attend that day, keep up with their overall progress, and also chat with one of our employees. This makes it easier to get organized and save time for studying," says Vera.

What are your future plans with Trengo?
Vera: "We would like to use Trengo's analytics more. For example, it would be very useful if we started paying more attention to the way we use labels. By labeling conversations, we can sort them by topic. If a certain label then comes up a lot in our analytics we could improve the information on that topic on our website."

The impact

This is how implementing Trengo impacted Rotterdam University:

• The accessibility of the front offices has increased
• Students get faster replies to their questions
• Students can start a live chat right inside of the student platform