The CX Revolution in Education: What CX Leaders Should Learn

When senior contact centre leaders talk about scaling experience at speed, the industries CX leaders look to for reference are usually pretty standard: retail, banking and telecoms, for example.

But some of the most revealing lessons aren’t coming from those sectors any more.

They’re coming from education.

The global education sector is quietly becoming one of the most complex real-world environments for customer experience design.

Not because it set out to be, but because it has to serve everyone at once: millions of users, faculty, staff, parents, and students, radically different expectations, and systems that were never originally designed for today’s digital behaviours.

In a recent conversation between Ted Brodheim, Global CIO Advisor for Education at Zoom, and our own Xander Freeman, Director of Call Centre Helper, took a deep-dive into what it’s like effectively running one of the most complex, under-structured CX environments in the world.

Let’s dive in.

The Reality of Large-Scale Transformation

From Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, to New York City public schools, to advising global higher education institutions, Brodheim has seen transformation from every angle – and his time in New York’s education system stands out.

And through all of his extensive experience, one thing he’s learned stands out: the education sector is now about millions of end users with different expectations, multiple communication channels competing at once, legacy systems still in daily use, and countless high-stakes emotional interactions.

There’s a lot to manage, and Brodheim explains that universities now operate across five generations simultaneously.

From faculty in their 70s and 80s through to students entering at 18, alongside digitally native early-career staff. Each group brings different communication norms, expectations, and levels of digital comfort.

From a contact centre perspective, this is the same issue seen in public sector service lines and large enterprise environments.

Customers expect instant digital resolution via chat or messaging, human escalation when complexity increases, consistency across channels regardless of age or ability, and flexibility in how they engage with services.

The core focus and something to always keep in mind is not only scale when it comes to the educational sector, but also sensitivity.

These are not just “users”, but students, faculty, researchers, and administrators, all interacting in the same ecosystem, often with conflicting expectations of what “good service” looks like.

So what is a CX leader to do?

The Campus Experience: A New Approach to CX Operating Models

In one of the most revealing moments in the conversation, Brodheim reframes how education institutions should think about service design altogether with his own philosophical moniker.

Instead of defaulting to corporate language like “customer” or even “stakeholder”, he introduces a more human, systems-based alternative.

By using “The Campus Experience” in regard to CX, he deliberately shifts away from transactional CX language and towards something closer to an operating model: one that recognizes multiple user groups, different working cultures/styles(?), and overlapping service expectations within one central system.

Schools, school districts, local education authorities, colleges and universities all have to deal with unique stakeholders across students, community members, to internal faculties and staff – each with their own unique needs and expectations.

Institutions are looking to optimize the student lifecycle that starts with recruitment and ends with alumni relations.

Whether admissions, enrolment, health services, financial aid, IT support, dormitory housing, or changes to class schedules, the need to resolve enquiries more quickly via different modalities like chat, SMS, phone, or video meeting is obvious.

For senior CX and contact centre leaders, this is where things become super-relevant. Most organizations already function like a “campus” without describing it that way.

Distributed teams, fragmented tools, different service expectations across departments, and customers who experience inconsistent journeys depending on where they enter the system.

The value of Brodheim’s framing is that it gives leaders a way to name that complexity without reducing it to corporate jargon.

It creates a language that is both human and scalable, which is exactly what modern CX systems are struggling to balance.

So what exactly does “The Campus Experience” mean?

Step One: Removing All “Taxes on Performance”

Brodheim explains:

For most contact centre leaders, we know this sounds familiar.

Think about all the disconnected CRM systems you might have: multiple chatbot layers, separate knowledge bases for different departments, and channels sprawled across voice, chat, email, and social.

Individually, each tool solves a problem, but collectively, they create fragmentation, and fragmentation destroys experience.

The emerging priority in education is not adding more technology, but simplifying the stack to improve:

1. Ease of use
2. Ease of maintenance
3. Cost efficiency

And critically, decision clarity for staff.

In every case, and every industry, complexity is not a feature, it’s a tax on performance.

When discussing large-scale change, Brodheim is unequivocal about where success or failure actually sits, and it becomes clear that leadership is the real transformation bottleneck in this instance, because that is where all the decision-making lies.

Step Two: Matching Language to the User

One of the most powerful ideas in the conversation comes when Brodheim explains how some universities are now redesigning knowledge systems using student-generated input.

Whether in education or contact centres, the future of experience design is not about adding more channels or more automation.

It’s about:

• Understanding user context
• Designing systems that adapt to language and behaviour
• Reducing internal complexity so external experience feels simple

And so, instead of relying on formal administrative documentation, institutions are:

• Asking students to describe processes in their own words
• Feeding that into AI systems
• Using it to train knowledge bases and virtual agents

The outcome is deceptively simple but culturally important: The system begins to speak in the language of the user. So instead of an institution speaking “corporate”, the response mirrors how a student actually communicates.

This tends to directly improve first contact resolution, user confidence in self-service, and emotional trust in the interaction. Brodheim notes that when users feel the system “speaks their language”, they are far more likely to believe the organization understands them.

The most powerful CX systems are the ones that quietly meet people where they already are, not where the organization assumes they should be.

Step Three: Using the Human Experience as the System’s True Performance Metric

Despite the world’s focus on generative and agentic AI, Brodheim consistently returns to human experience as the core measure of success – in terms of customers (in this case, students) and CX agents.

In terms of students he states:

And when it comes to CX agents, in most contact centres, success is still measured in call volume, average handling time and cost per contact. But Brodheim suggests that we reframe the metric entirely around resolution and emotional outcome.

For CX leaders, this is a strategic blind spot. You cannot sustainably improve customer experience while ignoring agent experience.

Brodheim’s Top Two Failure Points in Scaling CX

Brodheim is very clear that mistakes in this space tend to fall into two distinct categories, and both are easy to underestimate if you’re focused purely on scaling capability.

The first is around misuse, or more accurately, unexpected use.

Students (or customers, more generally) will always somehow bring complex, emotional, and sometimes sensitive issues into channels that were originally designed for straightforward queries.
Without the right safeguards in place, that becomes a risk very quickly.

Brodheim stresses the need to “very, very quickly identify those situations and escalate them to a human as quickly as possible.”

This means building clear escalation paths and “off-ramps” into every automated experience from day one, not as an afterthought.

The second mistake is more operational, but just as damaging: trying to do too much, too quickly.

In essence, scaling CX isn’t a roll-out, it’s a constantly evolving system. The organizations that get it right aren’t the ones moving fastest, they’re the ones adapting most intelligently.

Final Thoughts (and How Education Is Showing CX Its Future)

What makes the education sector so valuable to contact centre leaders isn’t how different it is, it’s how intensely familiar its challenges are, just at a higher level of complexity.

It’s navigating the same pressures you are:

• Rising expectations from increasingly digital-first audiences
• Complex, fragmented journeys across multiple channels
• Legacy systems that just need to be rewritten from scratch
• The constant balancing act between automation and human connection

Education is learning how to build more human, more adaptive digital experiences under extreme constraints, and contact centres have a rare opportunity to learn from that evolution and learn how to replicate it themselves.

Ultimately, whether you call them students, customers, or stakeholders, the goal is the same: create systems that feel simple to the person using them, even when everything behind the scenes is anything but.

It is a chance to learn from a sector that is already solving tomorrow’s CX problems today. A chance to move beyond simply adding channels or automating interactions and instead design experiences that genuinely fit the people they’re built for.

Author: Xander Freeman
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell