June 24, 2021
During the peak of admission cycles, Admissions Offices get inundated with calls, emails, social media messages, campus visits and more which overwhelm limitedly staffed offices.
A university wanted to significantly reduce their response time to provide timely responses to prospective students interested in learning about the university but could not see how as they faced limited financial resources and was unable to hire new staff.
We leveraged our technology, and the client’s most prized resource – students, to stand up a digital response platform to help our client tap into their rich student body’s experience and begin providing a focused, personalized, real-time response delivery mechanism through the UNIVISER Buddy app.
To ensure success, we also worked with our client to create a Student Ambassador/Student Buddy program to engage prospects. Afterall, students are the best advocates for a university’s mission. We found that students were eager to help, as they could personally relate to prospects (having been in their shoes). They also saw the program as an opportunity to mentor others and build their own professional profiles for their future.
To ease the onboarding burden for our client, UNIVISER handled the onboarding and training of Student Buddies, upskilling them on messaging etiquette and best practices. Within weeks, our client recruited student volunteers to be student ambassadors, received an overwhelming response, and utilized the UNIVISER platform to help future students and parents learn more about their university.
For more complex queries, beyond the students’ knowledge base, queries were successfully triaged to the Admissions Office for follow up to ensure no leads were missed. Our custom white label digital solution seamlessly integrated with our client’s existing branding, so that future customer had the assurance and confidence that the responses were coming directly from the university and not a third-party service.
With UNIVISER, the university’s average response time reduced from 48+ hours to 15 minutes. In addition, we immediately positioned our client to now respond to a mass of queries at scale, while still retaining a human touch. The client scaled up without experiencing significant costs by having to recruit and employ additional staff. Instead, they onboarded 14 student ambassadors across different courses. Had they employed 14 staff to handle the volume they received, it would have cost them over $100,000 USD per year.
Recognizing the value of their students, the client introduced an incentive program with non-cash rewards (e.g. gift cards, vouchers) to thank their volunteers for their service and followed up with recognition certificates.
"Where we used to have 2-3 people handling incoming inquiries, the Univiser Buddy system now gives us a team of buddies who handle the first wave inquires. This has been an amazing implementation, we have savings in terms of time and effort, the inquires being filtered before it reaches the student counselors. We have noticed that our leads through the buddy system are qualified and have already created lasting connections with our buddies which lead to better conversions!"
- Tatum D’Souza
Marketing Coordinator at Royal Institute of Colombo