6 Ways to Boost Student Engagement with Omnichannel CCaaS
Rakesh Kr Jha
Sep 12, 2023 | 7 mins read
The importance of digital technology cannot be overstated. From Netflix to Amazon, people of all ages are increasingly relying on digital devices and platforms for different aspects of their life. In this context, research by Pew Research Center reveals an interesting trend: parents generally allow their children to have their own phones when they reach the ages of 12 to 14. That’s how early our youth is embracing digital technology and becoming 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 this is where the efforts lose momentum.
Most educational institutions cannot coordinate and orchestrate the right context across channels, creating a disconnected communication journey.
Let’s break this down with an example: A student speaks to an education counsellor who gives them some excellent advice on which course they should choose. The student is excited and asks for course details to be sent via WhatsApp. Now, a few days later, when the student replies to that message, who responds? Is it the same counselor they spoke to earlier? Does the agent who replies understand the student and know what she has discussed earlier?
If educational institutes and edtech firms ensure that students, and parents, experience a smooth flow of communication across touchpoints, it can boost both satisfaction and conversions.
An omnichannel CCaaS (contact center as a service) can help. The right solution can create conversational continuity, automate repetitive conversations, reduce counselors’ workloads, and enable more meaningful student engagement.
Transform CX in Education with Omnichannel CCaaS
In this article, we share six practical ways in which edtech firms and educational institutes are leveraging Omnichannel CCaaS to scale up student engagement in an efficient, empathetic manner.
Let’s take a look at each one of these methods, in detail.
1. Build Campaigns for Awareness
An Omnichannel CCaaS for education can help edtech firms and educational institutes run more effective marketing and student awareness campaigns.
With this technology, you can plan targeted campaigns based on student segmentation or geo-location. You can then run these campaigns across a single communication channel or a combination of channels that are popular with your students. Your administrators can monitor these campaigns in real-time, allowing them to quickly customize or double down on campaigns that are making the maximum impact. They can easily view performance analytics across campaigns and channels on a single dashboard and make data-driven decisions.
Moreover, by tracking responses on virtual numbers, marketers can effectively track the ROI (return on investment) of their various advertisements.
They can also leverage the CCaaS platform to run outbound campaigns using non-conventional routes such as missed calls, chatbots, or WhatsApp promotions.
2. Drive Student Acquisitions
Once interest is generated and your counselors have gauged the candidate’s needs, preferences, or ambitions, they must now work strategically to convert the lead.
To enhance student engagement and enrollment and minimize drop-offs, you require your CCaaS system to seamlessly integrate with your CRM. Via CTI screen pops this integrated CCaaS will make student data, including their interaction history and interests, available to your sales teams, without revealing students’ phone numbers. Your counselors are now much better equipped to convert the student in a manner that’s frictionless and genuinely helpful.
Familiarity builds trust. Your system can instantly recognize students and route them to the same agent every time they call or WhatsApp using an intelligent call routing feature known as sticky agent. With this feature, students get to know their counselor over time, which makes them feel more comfortable asking for, receiving, and accepting their counselor’s advice, ultimately leading to higher conversions.
But that’s not all. You can also leverage automation features such as call note transfers, single click-dispositions and automated calendar invites to further streamline the sales process and reduce the administrative tasks that your counselors must complete.
3. Streamline Admissions & Payments
To streamline the admissions process, you can automate key touchpoints by setting up the right automated voice or messaging response systems. This could be a self-service IVR on your phone lines or a conversational bot on your website, app, or WhatsApp channel.
At various stages, the system can identify potential drop-offs and automate calls from specific teams to nudge students forward and help them complete their sign-ups or other admission processes.
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. These could include reminders to save their seats, pay an exam fee, or the semester fees, on time. Include these links in your SMS, email, or WhatsApp communications.
4. Boost Student Engagement
Once the student is enrolled, then comes the hard stage of retaining them throughout the duration of the course. Especially given how easily students today can drop off from an online course. It’s not enough to enroll a student, you need to ensure their success.
One way is to constantly communicate and share resources with them on the channels they frequent, rather than depending entirely on in-app conversations. CCaaS solutions have features for uploading resources like e-textbooks or reports on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, GroupMe, or Airsend.
Another way is to automate communications, including periodic phone calls, from an assigned mentor.
When you boost student engagement and usage, their performance improves over time, elevating their loyalty to the institution.
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, you can notify them about upcoming classes, examinations, changes in course curriculum, upcoming submissions, and more.
To enhance student engagement even further, cloud software like omnichannel contact center for education (CCaaS solutions) can identify key events like fee payment or exam dates and use voice bots on telephone calls to automate reminders, rules, or even advice. This can also help offload work that tutors and students would have to perform themselves by setting up calendar events or reminders.
6. Prevent Lead Leakage
As you seamlessly communicate with students throughout their journey with your school or college, you must not neglect aspects of security and data privacy. Educational institutions sometimes work with external partners for admissions, or they may have a distributed sales workforce, leaving a lot of scope for foul play and data leakage.
Securing this data becomes all the more crucial when you invest significantly in capturing and nurturing your prospect lists through sales and marketing cycles. Given this, technologies like number masking are very important for securing your lead data during sales conversations.
When it comes to choosing an omnichannel CCaaS solution, you must look for a platform that is robust, scalable, compliant with the latest data security regulations, and packed with enough features to personalize and manage your student journeys with ease. Here is where we can help.
Enhancing Student Engagement with Ozonetel’s CX Solutions
Ozonetel offers an omnichannel, full-stack CX platform with advanced features for creating empathetic, personalize and consistent student engagement with efficiency and ease.
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
Students today want a streamlined journey, one that saves them time and is extremely convenient. A few irate students and a few poor reviews on institutional evaluation portals can nosedive your school or university’s image in days, causing real business impact and risking your operations.
With your target users now expecting institutions like yours to offer the consumer-grade experiences like Netflix or Amazon, it is imperative that you invest in student engagement and create an experience that students will remember and refer to their network.
Ready to personalize communications at every step of the student journey?
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
