How do I enable a 24/7 student experience?

The Challenge

Students need and want to be able to do things in their own time. The rise of the digital age has allowed them to do this in every aspect of their life, so they expect the same from universities.

For example, set contact hours do not provide students with the means to manage their studies in a way that feels natural to them or in their own time, and so, enabling a 24/7 365 experience is the way to cater for such demands. This is especially true for international students where they’re up against different time zones making it virtually impossible for them to contact who they need, when they need.

So how do we deliver an effective service that doesn’t require multiple resources to be available on a 24/7 shift?

What we do

We will work out where the pain points currently lie. By looking at different areas from admissions to recruitment, process discovery enables us to understand where there are hiccups and how to solve the problems faced. More importantly, we’ll speak to your students directly to gain valuable insight into what their unmet needs are, and how best to overcome these.

We look at the wider picture to gain the necessary understanding of the business and students:

Carry out business process discovery to understand which processes could be made into a 24/7 service
Analyse the setup of each process
Work with and interview students to gain rich insight into how they find these processes and how they would like it to be

How we deliver it

We coach and work with internal teams directly to bring everyone together and working towards the same shared goal.

To get the insight needed to deliver an effective 24/7 student experience, we ensure we talk to everyone, from executive staff and frontline staff right through to the students themselves. By speaking with and interviewing students, we’re able to give the internal team the answers and clarity they need, and therefore building out a long-term, well-defined strategy for a 24/7 student experience becomes clear.

The impact it has

4.8/10

Average life satisfaction scores of students

By ironing out the process issues and eliminating the root causes, student satisfaction increases leading to deeper engagement with the university.

Not only do students directly benefit, but staff do too, as stress levels decrease, and their work morale increases. The power of technology enables an institute to automate manual processes that take up too much staff time, meaning that typical and traditional contact hours can be removed, and students can get responses instantaneously. Automation in this scenario allows students to deal with things in their own time, while staff can be facilitating richer, deeper engagement from students.

Average life satisfaction scores of students decreased by 9% from 5.3 to 4.8 out of 10, between 20 to 25 November 2020 and 8 to 18 January 2021