An unhappy student is potentially an irate customer, and a happy student will have a positive impact on education as a business. Optimizing the student experience to build a two-way relationship between a higher education institution and a prospective student is critical. Education is being disrupted in many different ways with automation, online learning, and alternative study options and higher learning companies need to change or lose students.
Universities that provide a consistent, personalized student experience will have a competitive edge – and a better student experience will lead to retention and acquisition of “millennials” through the campus’ high-tech reputation.
According to Gallup, engaged students are 2.5 times more likely to get excellent grades in school, than their actively disengaged peers. Students who are unhappy with their overall experience at a university are more than three times likely to consider leaving, than those who are happy. The report also shows that student engagement affects the academic results of those who stay.
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Eye opening facts
- Ovum’s 2018 Trends to Watch: Higher Education report states that a student-centric focus demands a personalized campus and learning experience.
- Nearly half of students in Gallup’s 2014 student poll report being either not engaged (28 percent) or actively disengaged (19 percent) in school.
- According to Ovum, improving the student experience is a top concern, with 94% of institutions considering deploying analytics to manage enrollment and 86% using analytics for alumni management.
- Student engagement can affect the academic results.
- 50,000 students dropped out of their degree last year with an attrition rate approaching 25 percent.
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Major challenges
Cultural shift -Customer experience is not always associated with higher education. For a long time, it hasn’t mattered to the education sector. Most universities do not have a process that offers a seamless student engagement journey, starting with enrolling, onboarding, etc. In 2015, when asked to prioritize their campus activities that require improvement, higher education institutions ranked onboarding second to last. Experts say that poor or insufficient onboarding experiences can leave a negative impression.
Real-time communication – Gone are the days when students rush to a physical notice board to fill out forms and enroll their names in a program, secure their tutorial time, or get university updates on various events and exams. Educational institutions, especially in the US, are much ahead in adopting technology to streamline administrative. However, supplying real-time responses to digital inquiries received via social media, online website forms and live chat remains a big challenge.
Seasonal workload – Administrative and academic offices around the campus experience fluctuations in demand for services, especially during the beginning of a semester, campus events, and campaigns. They are overwhelmed with a vast number of calls and inquiries from students trying to complete requirements and make adjustments in courses and schedules. Administrative offices aren’t equipped to handle this call volume, often resulting in long call waits and frustration.
Changing needs – There are plenty of mobile-friendly, digital platforms for educational institutions to ensure speed, convenience, and consistency of services to students as well as prospective students, parents, and visitors. But the market is constantly changing as younger students come in, demanding more innovative methods and emerging communication channels.
Seamless student interaction – Higher education is not just about classrooms and campus activities. It also involves various auxiliary services such as student housing, food service/dining, counselling, physical and mental health programs, emotional well-being, reskill programs, preventive care, athletics, events, bookstores, libraries, etc. Ensuring seamless student interaction amid these campus services is a big challenge.
Are you looking for answers to gain a competitive edge? Acqueon can help you redefine the student experience in the face of the rapidly changing educational landscape.
Who we are
Acqueon’s AI-based conversational engagement product suite provides an incredible boost for universities and higher education institutions to elevate their student engagement programs to the next level. Our proactive, personalized student engagement platform is equipped with all the right tools to manage the end-to-end student engagement journey, starting with enrollment and onboarding to ongoing student support and monitoring, creating a frictionless university life for students.
- Personalized outreaches based on students’ preferred channel and time/day.
- Instant alerts on admissions and registration processing and status, payments, faculty/course updates, lecture, program enrolments, reminders, etc.
- Automated appointments, based on the availability of staffs
- Multimodal campaigns with email/SMS trigger for university updates, news, events, etc.
- Automatic call-backs schedule and universal call queue management
- A complete student journey visualization dashboard
- Advanced and centralized list management and dialing strategies for inbound, outbound and blended contacts
- Integrated contact monitoring and digital voice/screen recording and real-time analytics
- Accurate data and staff monitoring; on-demand and real-time reporting
- Increased productivity with more Right-Party Contacts
- Regulatory compliance for DNC and consumer privacy and protection legislation; in-built data privacy and compliance tools
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Our mission
Our mission is to help you deliver an exceptional, endto-end student experience that sets you apart. With our “fully-digital” inbound and outbound campaigns, we enable educational institutions to have a 360- degree of the students and provide delightful and personalized experiences across all channels.
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What we offer
Offer the right support management anytime
Aqueon’s AI-powered conversational engagement suite delivers the right message at the right time to the right student, faculty, staff, alumni, and the public. The platform provides the staff with a 360-degree view of the students and prospective students, enabling them to offer relevant and personalized services. Thanks to the platform’s integration with multiple campus touchpoints and groups such as help desks, registrar’s offices, admissions offices, reservations desks, customer service teams, or ticket offices. Acqueon can easily handle large call volumes efficiently.
Take the lead generation and sales to the next level
Acqueon’s campaign orchestration tool enables the staff to interact and follow-up with students/parents through their preferred time/day and communications channels. These personalized outreach capabilities enhance the connect rate and promote healthy conversations, leading to better outcomes. If several attempts at reaching a student via telephone fail, the Acqueon campaign throttling feature will automatically shift to an alternate contact means – perhaps text or email.
Cross-channel student interaction management
Acqueon’s student engagement platform provides a cross-channel contact center experience, spanning multiple communication channels — mobile SMS, live chat, email, IVR (self-service) and voice support. Acqueon streamlines and simplifies administrative processes with two-way SMS communication and IVR technology that reduces the requirement of human intervention in providing answers to common student questions, making the system efficient and productive. Our engagement software is natively integrated and extends the functionality of Cisco and Amazon contact center platforms.
Intelligent inbound call management
Our intelligent call routing system quickly distributes callers to the most appropriate and next available staff to cut call handling time and improve support efficiency. It reduces caller frustration and saves staff time from calls being transferred to the wrong person. Acqueon also offers callbacks to reduce queue and automatically schedules call-backs from staff on dates/times that are most convenient for the students. It avoids long queues, significantly decreasing frustration.
Right party connect verification
Acqueon’s Right Party Connect can seamlessly verify the students’ contact information (name, address, additional phones, additional emails, property, demographics, and phone attributes) for the identification, scoring, and segmentation of individuals. It provides the level of verification on a scale of 100 points that reflects the overall status of the ID verification. Studies show that contact center agents are more willing to answer a call if they know the identity of the callers.
World-class regulatory compliance & monitoring
The platform helps companies keep track of TCPA, Do Not Call (DNC) list, GDPR, and internal regulations within the dashboard so that the dialer can avoid unnecessary infractions. Mobile phone numbers are automatically removed from calling lists when they appear on the Do Not Call Registry. Our outbound dialing is automatically restricted to approved calling hours. The platform also features accurate data and staff monitoring, on-demand and real-time reporting, contact monitoring, and digital voice/screen recording.
Success stories
Florida’s premier entertainment and media school that provides a unique campus experience by creating a mixture of business, art, and creativity in films, design, animation, and games, implemented Acqueon LCM to personalize the student experience and build a superior relationship at an early stage. The solution automated outbound campaigns at various enrollment stages, increasing the total number of enrollment applications and students. These proactive campaigns were able to identify new opportunities and student requirements in specific situations. Acqueon implemented real-time contact segmentation after each outbound interaction and set up a one-stop-shop for real-time tracking and reporting of students’ online enrollment progress individually.