UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM SUCCESS

The University of Birmingham sees over 100% growth for 3 consecutive years using the Online Store

REQUIREMENT

The university wanted to sell to students and external private and commercial customers. This literally covered anything from English language courses, alumni events and field trips through to replacement university ID cards. Most of these payments were historically taken at the Cashiers Counter or by departments via cash, cheques and bank transfers either face-to-face, by post or by telephone as applicable. The administrative burden associated with these, especially lower value payments and raising invoices, was considerable and sometimes disproportionate to the sums involved.

In conjunction with WPM, the University of Birmingham were probably the first higher education institution to provide an online payment facility within the UK. The Card Payment Gateway was launched in 2001 and allowed real-time payments using credit and debit cards for student fees. While this proved to be an instant success, and a catalyst for other institutions to adopt online payment facilities, it did not fully match the University of Birmingham's vision for providing a 21st century payment solution for all its services and products.

SOLUTION

This was in the form of the Online Store which WPM had launched shortly before at the University of Gloucestershire.

The University of Birmingham adopted a centralised approach where the store is managed by the Finance Office. Any department wishing to accept payments for goods or services can then request that these are made available on the Online Store. This model has worked extremely well for Birmingham with a minimal amount of staff training required by ensuring control is maintained centrally.

The Online Store is linked into the University's finance system and provides considerable administrative savings by ensuring funds are automatically allocated overnight with the capacity for real-time updates as required.

WPM continued to expand its service offering to cover the specific needs of the higher and further education sector and in 2008 the University of Birmingham took advantage of the Online Store modular system and added a Conferences and Events Module to enable them to easily sell places at Alumni Events, Conferences, Dinners, Meetings and Workshops online.

The Conferences and Events Module provides additional functionality from an administration and user perspective specific to administering, registering and paying for conferences and events, for example allowing online booking and payment for more than one attendee during a single shopping session and event specific elements such as delegate questionnaires.

The University of Birmingham have developed their Online Store to sell anything from accommodation lettings, replacement qualification certificates through to academic transcripts. Due to the easily managed and updated Online Store structure the opportunities for increased revenue are endless.

RESULTS

For the 2007/08 academic year the system processed over £1 million pounds and over 6,000 transactions. This has had a significant impact across the board in terms of not just improved efficiency and administration savings, but improved convenience and customer service, as well as a substantial impact in helping make many events and services a success.

The content of the store has continued to grow and substantial turnover is now being generated by new services which were not previously being offered and which the Online Store has helped facilitate. This is especially the case for conferences and events with a single conference counting for over £250,000 of turnover during 2007/08.

The University of Birmingham sees the Online Store as being core to their efforts to improve their e-payment services and actively promote the Online Store to continue to drive payers online and away from more traditional payment methods.