6 Ways to Boost Student Engagement with Omnichannel CCaaS
Prashanth Kancherla
Sep 12, 2023 | 6 mins read
The importance of digital technology cannot be overstated, and it has become an integral part of our lives. People of all ages are increasingly relying on digital devices and platforms for various purposes. In this context, research by Pew Research Center’s has revealed an interesting trend: parents generally allow their children to have their own phones when they reach the ages of 12 to 14. This highlights how quickly our world is embracing digital technology and becoming increasingly reliant on it.
Today, most kids use their parents’ smartphones to access digital-first content and services. As a result, many educational organizations have started to leverage the same channels and platforms to boost student engagement levels and grow their businesses.
But that is where the buck stops.
Most educational institutions cannot coordinate and orchestrate the right context across channels, forcing a disparate communication journey. Let’s break this down with an example: A student starts a query to a college over a customer support call and follows up with a WhatsApp message. The agent who replies to the WhatsApp query should not ask the student to repeat what they spoke over call. In short, there needs to be conversational continuity across every touchpoint in the student’s (or parent’s) journey with the educational institution.
Educational institutes and new-age edtech firms need to engage students (or parents) across the entire student lifecycle. An omnichannel CCaaS (contact center as a service) offers educational institutes a way to offer human support across each stage, and on multiple channels. It helps these firms to automate repetitive conversations, reduce workloads for counselors and equip them to engage more meaningfully with students.
Transform CX in Education with Omnichannel CCaaS
In this article, we share six ways in which edtech firms and educational institutes leverage Omnichannel CCaaS technology to engage students in an efficient, empathetic manner, at scale.
Let’s take a look at each one of them.
1. Build Campaigns for Awareness
Campaigns can be segmented as per student type or geo-location. They can be run across specific channels or a combination of channels that your potential and current students use. An omnichannel CCaaS for education helps you set up and monitor these campaigns while allowing, administrators to quickly customize or double down on high campaigns.
They can easily view performance analytics across campaigns and channels on a single dashboard, helping managers make data-driven decisions.
Moreover, Marketers can effectively track the performance of advertisements on channels by promoting virtual numbers with different channels. They could run outbound campaigns using non-conventional routes such as missed calls, chatbot, or WhatsApp promotions. This will help drive better value for every marketing buck you spend to increase awareness.
2. Drive Student Acquisitions
Once interest is generated and your counselors help gauge the candidate’s needs, preferences, or ambitions, they must work strategically to convert the lead.
To enhance student engagement, and enrollment while minimizing drop-offs, you should opt for a modern omnichannel contact center solution. With an omnichannel CCaaS, you can seamlessly integrate your system with CRM, enabling sales teams to efficiently track student data, including their interaction history and interests. It also offers handy automation features, such as transferring call notes from the contact center to the CRM and sending calendar invites, streamlining the sales process for better results
3. Streamline Admissions & Payments
Automating key steps of admission include setting up the right automated voice response or messaging response systems via telephone or conversational bots on the website or WhatsApp. You can enable this by using omnichannel solutions for student interaction like a cloud contact center, assigning specific teams to handle admissions inquiries, and nudging toward eventual sign-ups with the software. You can also generate custom links with the help of student management, ERP, or financial solutions that you use to add them to student communication and remind them to save their seats or pay the next semester’s fee. Include them in communication across SMS, email, social media, or messaging channels.
4. Boost Student Engagement
Once the student is enrolled into your school or university, the hard stage of retaining them throughout the duration of the course becomes a crucial factor, given the ease-of-use students have to drop off and get refunded. The cloud contact software solution has features for uploaded resources like e-textbooks or reports to be uploaded and shared with students across the platforms they frequent – social media channels, private- or school-messaging platforms like WhatsApp, GroupMe, or Airsend. When you boost student engagement, their performances improve over time as well, elevating their loyalty to the institution that helped establish their success and career foundation. The omnichannel CCaaS for education solution must also factor in assigning designated counselors and mentors automatically based on students’ needs and aspirations.
5. Keep Schedules on Track
Students’ and tutors’ lives are packed with assignments, classes, mid-term tests, and a whole lot more, making it easy for them to forget key events during their course. With effective student engagement tools, they can be easily notified of upcoming classes, examinations, changes in course curriculum or upcoming events, due dates to submit a project, and much more.
To enhance student engagement even further, cloud software like omnichannel contact center for education (CCaaS solutions) can even identify events or key information like due dates in emails or use speech-to-text and natural language processing technologies on telephone calls to offload work that tutors and students would have to perform themselves to set up calendar events or reminders.
6. Prevent Lead Leakage
Educational institutions can sometimes work with external partners to secure admissions or might have a distributed sales workforce, leaving much scope for foul play and inefficiencies. This becomes crucial for when you invest significantly to capture prospect lists for sales and marketing to work on. Given this, number masking technology becomes important to secure key lead information while allowing salespeople to call leads without knowing the numbers and leaving the door open for offline conversations.
Partners who work for your competitors can steal such valuable information as well, thus making it critical for you to leverage student engagement tools that have capabilities to prevent lead leakage.
Enhancing Student Engagement with Ozonetel’s CX Solutions
Ozonetel offers a comprehensive, full-stack CX platform with advanced features, providing omnichannel solutions for enhanced student interaction and engagement, ensuring a seamless and integrated student experience.
Here’s why top education platforms choose Ozonetel:
- A leading vernacular learning platform relies on Ozonetel for both inbound and outbound sales and customer support. With 300 agents deployed, they efficiently serve a significant number of students from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.
- A prominent online higher education platform empowers 250 agents who utilize Ozonetel for Sales, Support, and CX.
- An emerging edtech startup with 140 agents chose Ozonetel for outbound counselor-student interactions.
- An online upskilling platform trusts Ozonetel to handle learner (student) support and mentoring calls effectively.
In Conclusion
With students keen on using their time well to set themselves up for their career phase, student engagement is becoming critical. With a few poor reviews shared by potential or current students on institutional evaluation portals, your school or university’s image can nosedive in a few days, causing real business impact and risking your continued operations.
With your target users now expecting more from institutions like yours and knowing how consumer-grade experiences like Netflix and Amazon offer cross-channel engagement, it is imperative that you enhance student engagement strategies to a unified, seamless experience that students will remember and refer to their network.
Ready to take control of your call transfer
experience for better CX outcomes?
Frequently Asked Questions
SMS(Text), email, social media, and private messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram are the most popular communication channels being used by students today.
CCaaS software comes with a comprehensive solution for educational institutions to prospect well by displaying student or parent information well in advance to the counselors before they engage in discussions, hand off manual admission or engagement activities from the counselor to the solution, boost engagement levels by tracking the voice of the student and ensure satisfaction levels are high.
Indian universities and schools are using a blend of modern and conventional channels to engage students and their parents. While parents are comfortable with telephone conversations and SMS, students are open to email and new-age private messaging channels to be informed of the value institutions offer to build their future.
You can track drop-off rates when users (or students) have to repeat their case or personal details when they use a channel not used before in their interaction with the institution or get bombarded with non-personalized communication. You can also track the satisfaction scores of students during the evaluation, admission, and study phases to gauge how omnichannel strategies are working or not working well
