Customer Stories
Scaling student support and social engagement beyond simple publishing
How one forward thinking university brought teams from across different departments together to elevate how student queries are handled, streamline workflows, and build a CRM-ready digital front door.
The University of East London (UEL) is a university that puts careers first and is rooted in inclusion, innovation, and real-world impact. For more than 125 years, they’ve prepared students from all backgrounds with the skills, confidence, and experience needed to succeed in today’s changing world.
The challenge
As a modern university with an ambitious digital roadmap, the University of East London required a robust digital engagement infrastructure. Managing social presence for an institution of this size involves coordinating multiple internal teams, handling high volumes of inbound enquiries, and maintaining clear governance across diverse campaign areas – from student recruitment to campus life and careers, sustainability, and major awareness events.
Having previously been with another provider, UEL found that a limited social media management setup was no longer meeting the needs of its growing operational demands. The university needed a far stronger framework for managing inbound queries across multiple departments, broader platform access so various teams could collaborate comfortably, and a joined up system that connected social media management, community engagement, and analytics in one place.
Additionally, UEL were looking for a platform that provided a strong, long term strategic fit, specifically one capable of supporting future integration with their Microsoft Dynamics CRM system to streamline customer service workflows across the institution.
The solution
Recognising that Orlo was uniquely positioned to meet their broader goals in digital engagement, community management, and customer service, UEL decided to return to Orlo. To ensure a seamless onboarding experience and a set-up fully aligned with their requirements, Orlo’s Professional Services team was on hand to deliver end-to-end implementation.
The Orlo team managed a structured 5 day implementation programme delivered over 6 weeks, complete with weekly milestone calls, phased go lives, and ongoing validation check-ins. The technical and operational deployment covered several critical areas:
Platform governance and access. The Orlo platform was set up to support an unlimited users package, giving wider cross-departmental teams access to UEL’s central content calendar. This has streamlined scheduling and publishing across main university channels and diverse sub-brands, while improving governance, coordination and transparency across different officers and teams. This is helped by Single Sign-On (SSO), granular permissions, content approval workflows, customer notifications, UTM tracking, and mandatory alt text accessibility controls.
Customer service and query handling. UEL has started onboarding support teams to handle enquiries directly within the platform, a significant change that has been made possible by Orlo’s unlimited user model and query management. This has enabled quicker response times, reduced the workload for the central social media team, and delivered a better overall customer experience. The team implemented customer office hours, Inbox tagging, Snippets within the platform which enable users to utilise pre-built responses, automatic tagging rules, and priority (P1) escalation workflows for high-risk conversations, alongside dedicated team monitoring dashboards.
Content and campaign architecture. This involved the building of a bespoke campaign structure aligned with UEL’s recruitment and marketing objectives. This included establishing content pillars and a standardised system for categorising, labelling and tagging social posts. These were enhanced by location-based tagging to ensure clearer reporting.
Campaigns include:
- Recruitment and the student journey: clearing, undergraduate and postgraduate open days, graduation, Welcome Fest and events.
- Careers and employability: careers first, access to careers, career stories, employer collaborations, Love Your Careers, partnership awareness and National Apprenticeship Week.
- Student experience: campus life, student achievements, Team UEL, Active Campus, BUCS, Sports Dock and Wellness Wednesdays.
- Community and belonging: community engagement in East London, Welcome to East London, I Belong and wider belonging activity.
- Research and sustainability: research and news, sustainability, net zero and Sustainable Cities Festival.
- Awareness activity: Black History Month, International Women’s Day, LGBTQ+ History Month, Pride and Ramadan.
- Wider institutional activity: UEL news, PR, alumni, and various festivals and events.
Chatbot deployment. A social chatbot was designed and implemented, tailored around the prospective student journey. Mapping welcome messaging, priority topics, guided conversation flows, and smooth escalation routes to human agents. While the chatbot is an area that UEL continues to develop to unlock its full potential, it is already helping service the more straightforward and frequent student enquiries, either answering questions directly or signposting to the correct information, while retaining a route to the team where human support is required.
These topics include:
- Clearing
- UCAS and applications
- International students
- Courses
- Fees and funding
- Accomodation
- Student life and services
Integrations and consultancy. Data Studio was connected to their Orlo instance for advanced external reporting, and work began on a framework for the future Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration.
Tailored on-site training. The Orlo team delivered dedicated Inbox training, chatbot adoption sessions, and an intensive on-site training workshop to multiple teams within UEL, spanning the Orlo Inbox, Content Management, Analytics, and Orlo Insights.
The results
By returning to Orlo and leveraging the expertise of the Professional Services team, UEL has successfully reunited its social media management with its broader digital engagement and customer service strategy.
The university now actively uses Orlo across social media publishing, query and Inbox handling, reporting, and automated social chatbot activity. Internal workflows are significantly more efficient, enabling multiple teams to handle inbound student enquiries with ease while maintaining strict brand governance. By decentralising enquiry handling and centralising content, response times have improved, workload pressure has decreased, and collaboration across departments has expanded. With Looker Studio reporting now active, the planned Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration underway, and the framework established for ongoing chatbot developments, UEL has transformed social media from a basic publishing channel into a joined up, cross-departmental service hub.
Since implementation, UEL’s focus has centred on establishing self-service and efficiency. UEL’s social chatbot handled 241 sessions between the 1st of June and 20th August 2026, supporting students across a range of topics. This has led to a deflection rate of 35%, with more than one in three chatbot sessions not requiring a handover to an agent, demonstrating its effectiveness and the potential for self-service, reducing demand on UEL’s teams.
UEL is already looking at the next stage of their journey, exploring expansion into community management across additional social channels and public comments, developing their reporting and automation, and bringing more teams onto the Orlo platform as their social presence grows.
