Getting students off to the right start.

Supporting students seeking financial support

Abtran works with the national student grant awarding authority to support students and their families through a variety of outbound and inbound customer service activities.

We handle a high volume of calls, emails and post, as well as social media enquiries and comments throughout the year. During academic year 2022/23 there were over 87,449 applications, accompanied by 161,110 phone calls, 64,246 inbound postal items and 191,584 outbound follow-up letters. We also answered 53,999 emails and 22,785 social media messages.

Our team members handle queries on the grant process, how to complete a grant application, the status of the application and more.

As well as providing direct support to students through social media, we also create proactive messaging across social media channels to provide information and drive awareness of the service. We do this through the curation of monthly content calendars.

Key to our approach is the ability to scale up operational capacity and scale down when demand requires. Between December and February, we run a core team of only 12 but at peak this scales up to 60 people. Team members are trained to work across all channels, so that we can apply resource where it is most needed. A focus on succession management and deployment of staff across different functions helps to maximise skills, tenure and knowledge transfer.

Most importantly, Abtran is exceeding all quality target metrics for both front and back office services. Both targets are set at 85%, with front office achieving 95% and back office 100%. This is testament to our team and the attitude they bring to their work, which is done mostly remotely, with the exception of some mailroom functions.