What Operational Continuity Looks Like at Liaison
At Liaison, everything we do is focused on one goal: helping our partners achieve their most important class-building priorities cycle after cycle and year after year. It’s always been that way, of course, but this year the pandemic inspired us to accelerate our pace of innovation even more. We recognized our partners’ new needs, and we took advantage of new opportunities to help you address challenges nobody could have envisioned just a year ago. Here’s a look behind the scenes of how we helped our partner institutions achieve operational continuity during this period of disruption.
First and foremost, our operations — and by extension, our partner schools’ and associations’ processes — have experienced zero disruptions since the pandemic reshaped the world of college admissions. Thanks to a group of dedicated people who have kept everything going at our headquarters in Watertown since the earliest days of the pandemic, we’ve been able to continue serving each of our clients by processing paper transcripts without interruption.
In order to help our partners keep their admissions goals in sight this year, we also proactively reached out to about 2,500 registrars to promote electronic transcripts. We’ve never done that before at Liaison. In the past, the associations we work with traditionally took the lead. This year, in order to enhance the application process for schools and students alike, we created an e-mail option for registrars to upload official transcripts. After we did that, we hit an all-time record in June, when we received 5,000 electronic transcripts in a single day on behalf of our partner schools.
We also gave applicants the opportunity to upload unofficial transcripts, which we then verify. None of this would be possible with Liaison’s incredible — and essential — team members.
Great New Trends
April, May and June are typically relatively slow months at Liaison. But this year, May was our busiest month by far. The number of documents that we processed for our clients through April alone was approximately half a million. As a result, we’re on track to far surpass any of the numbers that we’ve seen in previous years.
Our verification numbers have increased as well. In July, for example, we went from 20,000 verifications to about 26,000. Since then, we’ve verified at least 10,000 more each month.
In addition, inquiry contacts for our partner schools approached the one million mark at the end of November, up from 930,000 at the end of March. That was a 40% year-over-year increase.
Even through the darkest days of 2020, Liaison managed to do more work for our clients than ever before.
Reaching New Heights of Success
We continue to work hard for our partners and their applicants almost around the clock, answering phone calls until 9 p.m., chats until midnight and emails until well after midnight. Our turnaround times are impressive: less than two minutes for calls, three minutes for chats and five hours for emails. (By the way, everybody loves our chat bot. We plan to do more with it in the near future.)
It was a tough year, no question, and operational continuity was something none of us could take for granted. Despite all of the chaos going on in the world, though, I wanted you to know about the outstanding job Liaison has done to help its partners maintain uninterrupted business continuity and achieve exceptional results in 2020. Our accomplishments during this time speak volumes about Liaison’s unsurpassed desire and ability to help your institution reach new heights of success and efficiency.
Regardless of what else may be happening in the world at any given moment, when you partner with Liaison you’ll have access to the same unparalleled resources and results that thousands of our partners rely on every day to stay focused on building better classes for their institutions.
By Deb Erdner, Vice President, CAS Operations