Improving Student Recruitment, Engagement and Retention
Recruit. Retain. It’s the mantra of higher education institutions. And rightly so—it’s an aggressive market. Your prospective students are not short on options...or expectations.
You are targeting a high-tech, high-touch generation. Their online and support service experiences should directly reflect the caliber of your institution. But providing easy access to detailed information residing in various knowledge bases is a major challenge.
Taking steps to overcome this obstacle is well worth it. Centralizing access to information from scattered departments, functions and processes doesn’t just drive efficiency and cost savings—it strengthens your institution’s brand. You move from telling prospects and students you can meet their needs to showing them you’re serious. An impressive, engaging support experience emerges.
Establishing and sustaining this new type of experience boosts enrollment, retention, referrals, donations and alumni contributions. But with cost constraints, complex administrative processes in place, an overburdened IT department, and so many aspects of the student lifecycle to manage—how is it remotely possible?
We can help.
Flexibility is everything in an environment of continual change. You need technologies that can keep pace with the many aspects of your support services, while simplifying your IT and communications landscape. Our flexible, multichannel CRM solutions accomplish this and much more. We meet the complex needs of higher education institutions, while driving operational efficiencies and reducing costs.
Astute Solutions’ technologies enable you to:
As an educational institution, you’re contending with vast amounts of information—stored across campus—relating to recruiting, enrollment, financial aid, courses, alumni donations, and more. And you’re dealing with a generation of students looking to engage on their terms, through multiple channels.
With our CRM and contact center solutions, the multiple knowledge base “labyrinth” is replaced by a single interface and powerful, unified platform. They help you build and strengthen relationships by:
Providing consistent, accurate and timely information across channels.
RealDialog serves as a single knowledge engine for multiple touch points and applications. It can be used to:
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Empowering your front-line staff to deliver great support.
RealDialog provides your personnel with the precise information needed to answer complex questions and resolve complicated issues. They have instant access to a “virtual expert” throughout the interaction.
Your support representative simply types in a prospect’s or constituent’s question as they ask it—or selects a question submitted via email or chat—to receive a rapid, concise and accurate response.
Unlike their experience with other knowledge base tools, your front line staff members do not lose time and focus with RealDialog. They are not taxed with searching through long documents, or scrolling down extensive lists of irrelevant or generic FAQs/links in search of an answer.
With RealDialog at work, your support personnel, constituents and prospects are provided with accurate and relevant details that address their exact needs.
Differentiating responses by role.
Higher education institutions looking to leverage CRM are challenged. They must find a way to differentiate interactions based on the many types of inquiries they receive, the numerous departments involved, and the fact that constituents are utilizing multiple communications channels. We resolve this challenge.
RealDialog enables you to create interfaces or “tune” responses for specific roles (admissions director, advisor, support representative, student, etc.) and delivery channels (Web, phone, email, chat, mobile, etc.). The responses are all maintained within RealDialog, but can be separated within a single interface and application. You designate and control the look and feel of each interface, and the responses that can be accessed by end users.
Providing a positive online service experience that prospects and constituents will appreciate.
As a self-service solution, RealDialog Self-Service aligns the constituent experience with their needs and behaviors. It acts as a “virtual assistant” on your website, quickly delivering the answers and information they need—hassle-free.
Visitors can phrase a question however they choose and receive a precise response. When appropriate, RealDialog Self-Service engages them in a “conversation” to better understand their needs, improve accuracy, and personalize responses by leveraging data from other systems.
For example, when a prospective student enters: “What is the foreign language prerequisite for English majors?” RealDialog delivers the relevant information for their exact request—not a long list of general requirements and areas of study to sort through. It accesses multiple constituent and knowledge repositories, such as admissions and course offerings, and incorporates the data it finds into a decision-making process. From there, it formulates and delivers personalized responses.
With its interactive dialog capability and exceptionally high accuracy rate of up to 99 percent (versus the 45-60 percent range of other solutions), RealDialog addresses questions and resolves issues more successfully than any other self-service solution. This leads to a very rewarding end-user experience.
RealDialog is easily adapted and enhanced with specific terminology that relates to your processes and offerings.
Enhancing trust and confidence in your institution.
Building
trust is largely a formula of consistency over time. There’s no shortcut,
but there are facilitators like surprising and delighting your constituents
with personalized experiences.
RealDialog brings these elements together, enabling you to earn trust
and satisfaction with your Web visitors. This enhances the success
rate of your recruiting and retention efforts, while streamlining administrative
processes and cutting costs.
Our RealDialog solution improves your online and offline conversion
rates by:
Reducing abandonment by helping prospects and visitors quickly find what they need.
RealDialog can help your visitors find the specific information they need very quickly—regardless of where they enter your site, or how deep the content resides.
By simply asking a question on any Web page that offers a RealDialog “agent,” visitors access the exact content and information they need in mere seconds. This reduces the frustrations that lead to abandonment.
Uncovering and understanding prospect and constituent needs.
With intelligent dialog capabilities, RealDialog can ask specific questions to uncover and understand a visitor’s needs. It delivers targeted messages and guides them to the content, regulations/guidelines, application status updates, course/activity information, or contact details that best address those needs.
It can ask prospects and constituents about specific scenarios, their goals and objectives, financial needs, and more. It then applies this information to deliver content that boosts confidence, trust and further exploration along the path to attending your institution, seeking guidance to remain enrolled, or committing to a contribution.
Delivering the right messages and content to the right person at the right time.
RealDialog gives you much greater control over your message delivery. It leverages visitor input, the context of their visit, and information on the page they are visiting to determine the best response. This gives you the power to respond to prospects, students, alumni and others as you would in a face-to-face meeting or presentation.
Improving recruiting, donation and engagement efforts online.
Much like a trusted recruiter, support
representative, or advisor; RealDialog helps prospects and constituents
make better decisions based on their specific wants and needs or situation.
For example, RealDialog can deliver responses tailored to eliminate
doubt, reinforce the caliber of your faculty and course offerings,
specify where donation funds will be allocated, or to highlight aspects
of life on campus if the visitor has a question.
In addition, it can increase engagement and participation in campus donation campaigns, book store purchases, events, and activities by delivering track-able offers.
Leveraging the contact center to improve recruiting, satisfaction and retention.
When leveraged in the contact center as a support representative knowledge base, RealDialog bolsters your recruiting, retention and contribution efforts.
It helps your staff member set the stage by resolving the issue at hand and delivering targeted messages, offers, or considerations based on what transpired during the interaction.
Leveraging information gathered like the reason for the inquiry, contact information, information stored in the CRM database, and more—it produces a context-sensitive script. Your front line support personnel are automatically prepared to extend a compelling message—at the right time.
Throughout the interaction, RealDialog is guiding your staff member through a conversation with the prospect or student, prompting them with specific questions and responses that take them down the path to increased interest in your institution, increased trust in your commitment to students’ needs, confidence in seeking guidance from advisors, and assurances that their contributions are making a difference.
This functionality dramatically improves front-line recruiting efforts, student/parent satisfaction, and donation efforts. Vast amounts of information (that would otherwise be impossible to manage/memorize) is readily accessible to leverage on a wide scale.
Our RealDialog solution enables administrative staff, faculty, recruiting, and subject area experts to quickly create, edit and update content for all channels, while leveraging your existing content and systems.
Improving information dissemination across channels. RealDialog provides a centralized point of administration to rapidly push knowledge out to all channels (Web, intranet, email, chat, phone and IVR). It enables you to differentiate responses by area, channel and user roles (prospect, student, administrator, advisor, front-line support representative, etc.).
You gain control over the messages delivered, while simplifying information distribution, ensuring information consistency across channels, and improving the overall quality of information.
Simplifying administration. Campus IT departments are stretched thin. Our RealDialog knowledge management solution enables non-technical business users to create and update its knowledge base. Because it can deliver or point to any type of existing enterprise/cross-campus content relevant to enhancing the response—such as Word documents, PDFs, Web pages, sound and video files, constituent data, and more—you can leverage existing content. It remains in its native location, so you are not burdened with recreating it in a separate knowledgebase.
RealDialog helps you respond faster to changing needs, requirements, and processes while keeping ongoing maintenance costs low. Its authoring tool suite does not require complicated scripting and programming—just text and HTML. Recruiters, support managers and administrators can add, modify, and tailor responses, content, and dialogs for multiple touch points.
Minimizing start-up time and costs. RealDialog also “learns” quickly from your existing Web pages, documentation and content. This reduces your overall start-up time and costs, while shortening time-to-benefit.
Our CRM and call center solutions help you fulfill requirements surrounding the financial aid and grant processes, diversity guidelines, admissions standards, campus safety, and more. Through capabilities like complete interaction recording and audit trails, our solutions provide a traceable, detailed account of all discrepancies, inaccuracies and issues as they are captured, escalated, and investigated.
ePowerCenter acts as an early warning system about problems that could lead to funding/financial aid issues, health and safety issues, undesirable publicity, or even lawsuits.
When incoming complaints match the specific issue alert thresholds established by your institution, the system sends notifications to alert key personnel—such as those in admissions, legal, compliance, health services, security or building/dorm maintenance.
They can then drill down into the details to make more informed decisions. Your institution can be proactive in responding to and resolving issues—catching them before they escalate to an extremely costly, uncontrollable level.
This functionality is critical for higher education institutions that are managing aspects of students’ financial eligibility and ensuring the health and safety of everyone on campus.
Creating targeted lists from the contact center’s database. Our constituent service and support application, ePowerCenter, offers a mass mailing feature for creating targeted mailing lists. You can send printed letters, newsletters, articles, research studies, surveys, email, or enclosures to specific prospects, students, parents and alumni contained in your contact database.
Lists can be created using a combination of selection criteria such as: reason for contact, graduation date, area of interest, academic parameters, and more. Recruiting, retention and donation personnel gain cost-effective, highly-targeted opportunities to educate.
Improving deliverability. Additionally, to eliminate old or duplicate ‘data debris’ that impacts the deliverability and cost of letters and email, ePowerCenter provides powerful address duplication detection and delivery-ready address cleansing to ensure that customer contact information is concise and correct, without manual editing.
Colleges and universities conduct market research, focus groups, studies and surveys to better understand prospect and constituent opinions, needs and feelings. Yet they can’t always gain good insight into areas of unmet or implicit needs. This information is usually lost when “slicing and dicing” the survey results.
By providing multiple reporting options for “voice of the constituent” data, our solutions provide an exceptionally valuable source of information to supplement your formal research efforts…at a far lower cost than market surveys. You’ll benefit by:
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