July 1, 2025 – Duration 30:11

S5. Ep.2 How Western Governors University Improved Staff and Student Experiences

Western Governors University (WGU) needed a solution that could support the needs of their staff and students. We sat down with Darin Graves, Senior Manager, Service Desk, at WGU to learn how moving to the cloud enabled new channels and new visibility into metrics that drove better experiences.

Transcript

• 00:06 Greg Thomas

  I’m Greg Thomas from Genesis and welcome to level up CX Tech where we delve into the most pressing issues, opportunities and challenges in customer experience right now and how you can use CX technologies to see real business value.

• 00:21 Michael Logan

  And I’m Michael Logan. And today on our episode, we’re going to be joined by Darin Graves with Western governors and he’s going to talk to us about their transformation CX.

• 00:36 Darin Graves

  Alright, guys.

• 00:37 Michael Logan

  Welcome, Darin.

• 00:39 Darin Graves

  Glad to be here. My name is Darin Graves. I’m the Senior Manager over the Service Desk at Western Governors University. I’ve been with the company about nine years. Started as a student before working at WGU, and have been very involved in our Genesys usage since 2019.

• 01:06 Greg Thomas

  Thank you, Darin. I’m so glad you’re here. Why don’t you carry that a little further—tell us about WGU, what the school is there for, how you operate, and a bit about your team and the work you do.

• 01:22 Darin Graves

  Absolutely. Western Governors University was started 26–27 years ago by the governors from the western United States. They saw online learning as an opportunity. Mike Love at the Governor of Utah at the time saw a huge opportunity to harness the Internet to allow University to provide education to people in very remote areas. They ran with that and we’ve been at the forefront of online education ever since. We are an accredited university. We pride ourselves on being a very economical resource… my role at Western Governors University is to support the staff and students with any technological issues that they may encounter. So we’re a regular service desk with the two different customers that we have.

• 02:26 Greg Thomas

  So when you think about that infrastructure that you support and that’s there to support the students and the staff. Like what did the infrastructure universe sort of look like, if you will? And what were the challenges you were facing when you thought about moving forward with the CX transformation project, essentially?

• 02:47 Darin Graves

  Absolutely. We went through a period much like other companies where we saw cloud as a huge opportunity, most of our applications were running on servers in backrooms in various areas, various locations. We had a push to move anything that we could to a cloud based solution since the majority of our employees are remote. We found that our current communications application, which was in… we have a lot of issues that we wanted to resolve. About that time as we were looking at different cloud solutions Genesys purchased in, we looked at a few different competitors but ultimately saw Genesys as being the most advanced and included the things that we were most interested in and we made that move in 2019. Took us about three months of planning, preparation and then implementation. My team was the first. We piloted it and took our learnings and then spread out throughout the rest of the teams and moved them through. So my team was very involved in the implementation, training, making sure that all the technology was working, that everything was connected.

• 04:23 Michael Logan

  With that move to cloud, what were the immediate benefits or surprises?

• 04:43 Darin Graves

  Reliability was a big one. We used to have to bounce between West and East Coast servers when one failed. Every call dropped, we’d have to call customers back. With Genesys, that stopped. We also unlocked a lot—speech and text analytics, workforce management, evaluations. We expanded our channels from just phone and email to include web chat, web messaging, SMS, and we’re working on social media integration.

• 06:21 Greg Thomas

  That’s a lot of newness and potential. One challenge organizations face when moving to cloud is the constant refresh of features. How have you adapted to that innovation cadence?

• 07:21 Darin Graves

  I’m a big fan of change. Before, we were limited—say, my training manager wanted to tweak a QA rubric. That meant a request, a dev sprint, delays, and mistakes. With Genesys, they can do it themselves. We’ve spun up new queues in hours. Releases feel like Christmas for us. We review every new feature and assess what it could mean for us. It’s exciting.

• 10:32 Greg Thomas

  So when you think about well there’s a cadence of ongoing innovation. It shows up in the release notes every week and you say oh what’s available to us. You may also have a list of things that you want to implement, you know business requirements and the like. How do you kind of marry those two lists of possible improvements to make sure you’re both delivering what your internal users need, but also staying agile to what might be coming that you hadn’t necessarily considered?

• 11:10 Darin Graves

  Yeah, that’s a great question and it’s something that we’ve talked about a lot. We have a vision of what we would like our quality, training, and daily operations to look like, and we’re always looking at how we can advance that. Whether it’s AI, speech and text analytics, topic mining… In the past, when we saw a need—like for a quality system—we built something custom in ServiceNow. But we boxed ourselves in. Any change to that system meant a formal request and a dev cycle. Now, we’ve learned to hold off and wait for out-of-the-box solutions. And often, Genesys delivers exactly what we need.

• 13:06 Darin Graves

  We talked about needing a data lake to pull from, and sure enough, a year later Genesys announced one. So we’re looking at that now. If we wait a bit, we often get something better than we would have built. We’ve also had direct meetings with Genesys developers and contributed suggestions through the community forums. Many of the features that eventually roll out are exactly what we would have wanted—and better. We’ve been very happy with that approach.

• 15:23 Michael Logan

  I want to dive into a little bit more around how you’re servicing. You said you had two customers that you’re servicing, but there’s probably several departments that you’re dealing with, right? Can you describe a little bit about your layout there?

• 15:32 Darin Graves

  Yeah. Absolutely. Our largest group is mentors—about 3,500 to 4,000 full-time faculty assigned to students. Since we’re remote, they often face technical issues. They’re not IT experts, so we support them with handholding and guidance. Then there are 185,000 students, plus about 5,000 in WGU Academy (our sister program). WGU Academy gives prospective students a pathway to demonstrate readiness. We also support departments like IT, Financial Services, Enrollment, and Assessment. In total, my team supports over 250 systems, tools, and applications.

• 18:35 Michael Logan

  And across all that, you’re working with all these different organizations internally. How does your team think holistically about CX strategy at that point? What’s the mindset there?

• 18:47 Darin Graves

  Genesys has been easy to work with. We often pilot features like SMS or web messaging internally before rolling them out to students. Pilots help us minimize mistakes and tune implementation. It’s also incredibly intuitive for our agents—whether it’s SMS, email, or web chat, it all looks the same in their UI. No special training is needed. That surprised us. It’s been a seamless adoption experience.

• 21:19 Michael Logan

  So Greg, I don’t know if you were keeping count on that, I think we had about 4 to 5 “easy” references…

• 21:27 Greg Thomas

  Yeah, and a good buzzword being going Omni channel too, right?

• 21:32 Darin Graves

  Yeah, yeah. I continue to be amazed at just how easy the implementation and adoption has been. A great example: my QA/training manager took a Beyond course from Genesys. Within 30 minutes, she paused the course, built a complete evaluation form in Genesys, and walked into my office to show me. Three weeks later, we had migrated completely from our old ServiceNow QA tool into Genesys. The whole team was trained in a day and a half. It was a huge win for us—fast, flexible, and efficient.

• 23:56 Michael Logan

  And that’s all from one day of courses, right? Or half day or…

• 24:02 Darin Graves

  She didn’t even complete the course at first. She was 30 minutes into it, paused to try it hands-on, built the rubric, and got her team using it by the end of the week. Within three weeks, we were fully migrated. It’s exciting and fun.

• 24:34 Michael Logan

  Well, everything you’ve described is what we define as orchestration—being able to create all these experiences and deliver exceptional customer and employee experience. With all that, what are some of the key KPI improvements you’ve seen?

• 24:58 Darin Graves

  Absolutely. One of the best examples is our asynchronous response time for email and web forms. We used to average about 9.5 to 10 hours for a meaningful response—like an actual troubleshooting step or direction. After implementing email routing with Genesys, we brought that down to under 1 hour. It’s around 45 minutes for students now. That was a huge win and continues to be one of our proudest moments.

• 26:51 Greg Thomas

  That’s fantastic. So what’s next—where do you want to take the service desk and CX from here?

• 27:05 Darin Graves

  That’s a great question. Honestly, we’re going to sit back and let Genesys help guide us. They’ve shown they’re thinking ahead—globally and strategically. One big area for us is AI, especially in QA and evaluations. We want to start automating summaries, use AI to reduce manual effort, and take advantage of the Genesys–ServiceNow integration that was recently announced. Those two platforms are core to our workflow, and connecting them will be a game changer.

• 28:57 Greg Thomas

  Final question—what advice would you give others on this journey? Any key takeaways from your experience?

• 29:09 Darin Graves

  Get very engaged with Genesys. Lean on your reps. Ask questions. Take their advice. It’s kept us from making mistakes and helped us move faster and smarter. That engagement makes all the difference.

• 29:37 Greg Thomas

  Well, we want to thank Darin Graves from Western Governors University for joining us today and sharing his experience and strategies. Thank you also to our listeners. There’s more to come from WGU in future episodes. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and visit genesys.com to learn how you can level up your CX. Until next time, thanks for listening.