Updated 10/23/2023 As we travel across the country and speak with institutions about online...
As the person ultimately responsible for ensuring enrollment growth at your institution, you will be challenged with “defending” and advancing any changes to existing plans. You may find yourself wondering ..."What will leadership (and my team) want to know about my plan to introduce a Contact Center partnership?"
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could guess what questions might be asked of you before these presentations?
Well, look no more!
This Contact Center Guide contains all of the answers to common questions you may be asked.
Why Can’t Our Institution Do This on Our Own?
Your recruiters were likely hired due to their love for developing relationships with qualified, interested prospective students—not due to their previous success as an outbound Contact Center Agent. And, yet, as many as 80% of all recruiters who fail within their first year, do so because of insufficient prospecting activity.
So, how can you get your admissions team more opportunities to speak with qualified and interested prospective students? We have invested years in optimizing our technology, team, culture, and messaging to effectively generate and engage thousands of leads each month on your behalf, efficiently nurturing them to the type of qualified prospects that set your Admissions Team up for success. Learn more about how we engage your students with admissions contact cadences.
How Will You Represent Our Brand?
To your prospective students, our teams will seem as one and the same. During launch, our teams will co-produce training assets, messaging, and build a customized Knowledge Base that accurately reflects your institution's brand positioning and value statements. Your dedicated EB team will conduct outreach using assets approved by your team. Every text, call script, and piece of content will be informed by what we have learned over the past decade and filtered through your brand voice.
Furthermore, in the spirit of kaizen™, our teams will connect regularly for tactical meetings where we review performance, discuss any concerns, and dial in on frequently asked questions to make sure we are constantly optimizing the collaboration over time.
Regardless of whether EB is the right fit for you, we believe that a dedicated team that solely represents your institution is critical to call center or contact center outsourcing success. It is the only way to ensure a high-quality conversation that reflects your values and needs and offers a seamless experience for the prospective student, which ultimately translates to greater enrollment success.
Enrollment Builders Focuses on Outbound Phone and Text, but Why Not Email?
Our industry loves email—mostly because we get to control the frequency and the timing of the communication. But, every institution is using this same approach. And, while email has proven extremely successful in eCommerce for driving transactions, it is not conducive to building a relationship. To really stand out and engage a prospect, you need consistent outreach that meets them on their terms for dialogue: via text message after hours, on weekends, and even on holidays.
If you’re not employing consistent text messaging as a prospecting tool, you are missing out. Training your team to use conversational messaging with prospective students will ensure that your admissions team is building relationships rather than being transactional. Combine this with dialogue on their terms, and you are immediately differentiating your institution from the others they could consider.
What are the Intended Outcomes?
Our team applies a decade of experience producing successful enrollment outcomes for our clients with at least a 1,000% return-on-investment, or better. We leverage a leading-edge Contact Center Platform, engaging content, and our domestic, higher ed-focused staff to cultivate relationships with prospective students that you have not yet engaged. Through strategic and structured contact cadences, we develop and maintain the relationship on your behalf for as long as you need us to—transitioning these qualified prospective students back to your admissions team at whatever point in the journey makes the most sense for your team. Institutions choose between the following transition points:
- Qualify, confirm interest, and warm transfer to your team.
- Qualify, confirm interest, and schedule an appointment for your team.
- Qualify, confirm interest, and maintain the student relationship until they have completed their online application.
- Qualify, confirm interest, and maintain the student relationship until they have completed their online application, and have successfully submitted any additional materials, such as transcripts.
- Qualify, confirm interest, and maintain the student relationship until they have reached add/drop, transition to Advising.
How Will You Measure Success?
Like you, we ultimately measure success as the total amount of enrollments generated from our work together. We have a decade of experience in this space and are confident the investment you make with us will be tuition revenue-generating. That said, the upside on the investment will be helped or hindered by the extent to which we successfully collaborate. Our job is to activate prospective student relationships and turn them into prospective students that we hand off to your team to do what they do best so you can meet or exceed your enrollment potential.
What are Other Ways to Solve This Problem?
To solve your problem, you could buy more leads, convert the ones you have more efficiently, or both. EB is adept at both generating more leads and converting existing leads more efficiently, and we are happy to support you in whatever area(s) would make the biggest impact for your goals.
Most institutions aren’t doing enough to make their partnerships with companies like EAB and RNL successful without additional infrastructure investment and TIME. Many of our clients who already work with “search” companies find they need additional help cultivating relationships with these prospective students.
Do You Have the Right Technology for This?
Enrollment Builders’ technology seamlessly integrates with the most common higher education CRMs such as Slate, Salesforce, and Velocify.
Why Can’t We Just Hire the People Required to Do This Work Internally?
You absolutely could hire an internal team to do this work, but many institutions lack the experience required to stand up to these new efforts quickly and successfully. The change management required to successfully embrace change internally could take well over 18 months and would likely lead to millions of dollars in lost tuition revenue associated. Our culture is designed to embrace the work required for success and in a fully remote world, that's no easy feat! With EB, you benefit from a decade of our experience and the foundational processes and technology we have in place. And finally, big internal hires require a long-term commitment, regardless of their ability to grow growth outcomes.
While these questions are answered from an Enrollment Builders perspective, please be sure to have any Contact Center answer these questions for you in advance of partnership.
We'd love to help answer any other questions you or your leaders may have about working with a Contact Center. You can schedule some time for a call here.
