Fergal Doherty
Director of Student Services · 51-200
1 review written · 5.0 average
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Reviews by Fergal Doherty
★★★★★
Scaling a chat platform across a growing team in a non-profit education environment is genuinely harder than it sounds. Budget scrutiny is intense, staff turnover is constant, and you can't afford six weeks of onboarding every time someone new joins. What surprised me most about LivePerson is how little friction there is when you add new agents. A year in, my team has grown from three people handling student inquiries to eleven, and the admin side of that growth has been about as painless as I could have hoped for. Supervisor dashboards, role assignments, skill-based routing, all of it scales without requiring you to rebuild anything from scratch.
The bot integrations deserve a mention too. We started simple, just automated FAQs around enrollment deadlines and financial aid queries, and the students genuinely engage with it. Transfer to a live agent works cleanly when the conversation needs a human. LiveEngage's analytics have also pushed my team to have more honest conversations about where we're dropping the ball. Queue times, response quality, agent load distribution, it's all visible and it changed how we staff certain hours.
My one real frustration is the reporting export options. Getting data out in a format that plays nicely with our internal dashboards takes more manual fiddling than it should. Customer support has been helpful, though response time on non-urgent tickets can stretch longer than I'd like. For a team in education trying to serve students well without a corporate tech budget, this platform has delivered far more than I expected. If you're running a growing support operation and need something that doesn't fall apart as you add people, this is worth a serious look.
