Modern student engagement decoded

The term student engagement is quite a buzzword in today’s education and training sector. It’s been so overused that it’s often misconceived as an item on a checklist rather than an ongoing relationship between an institution and students, that depends on student preferences and behaviour. Student engagement is about actively interacting with your audience with messaging that interests, educates, or helps them and encourages two-way conversations with the institution. In simple terms, it’s just about learning and anticipating what students want and then giving it to them at the right time.

This, however, is easier said than done, especially given that most of your current and future audience are millennials and zoomers. Being digital natives, your audience has a plethora of choices, richer and faster access to information, little or zero tolerance for complicated processes, and are increasingly privacy-conscious. All this translates to a power shift, and we’ve decoded what that means for you as a business and how you can adapt to this new market reality.

The most significant change is that mobile usage has overtaken desktop usage, and students are more likely to look something up on their phones or tablets than a computer.

So the first step is to make your website mobile friendly and create mobile apps for major mobile OSs. Step two is to ensure your website visitors and mobile app users can reach the institution instantly for information or help, by adding live chat on the website and mobile apps. In addition, our mobile SDK, Mobilisten, helps you automatically set up contextual, personalised push notifications and even add relevant in-app messages to nurture your mobile app users.

Cross-device shopping is also a challenge that makes it difficult for institutions to maintain a consistent brand identity and experience, more so for businesses with multiple brands and qualifications. We’ve solved this with a single admin space to manage each of your brands’ multiple digital touchpoints.

The main requirement of student engagement is being available to existing and prospective students at the time the choose to study. This is especially challenging in the present scenario, where time and geography have become irrelevant, and prospects and students expect institutions to be reachable around the clock. The advent of chatbots has made this possible without hiring employees to cover multiple shifts, but having developers/agencies build bots for your multiple requirements is going to be expensive. We’ve solved this with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop chatbot builder that makes creating a bot as easy as drawing a flowchart!

Though chatbots were invented to free up your staff from mundane tasks so they can focus on more complex ones, research shows that customers find it harder to get issues resolved by AI chatbots.

Zoho SalesIQ offers you the best of both worlds with Answer Bot— an AI-driven chatbot that can greet your prospective- and existing students and respond to small talk with engaging phrases, and even understand common queries, regardless of the tone or terms used, and answer them using your resources. At any point if the student decides to switch to a human agent, the bot can forward the chat to one of your student support team members.

Personalisation is considered the pinnacle of student engagement, but when you’re dealing with a more privacy-conscious generation of customers, it’s too easy for institutions to inadvertently cross the line between being helpful and just plain creepy. Zoho SalesIQ lets education providers deliver timely and relevant messaging to your most valuable leads right when they need it, like an offer for assistance during registrations, or when they’ve spent a long time trying to decide between two qualifications.

Set up automated chat invites and notifications based on the data prospective students voluntarily give you, publicly available data like company details in the case of B2B models, non-sensitive information like visit source, pages visited, time spent and actions on the site, order history and other data available on your CRM if they’re existing customers, date, time or even day of the week. You can also display a GDPR banner if your customers are in the EU. 

Many institutions fall prey to ad fatigue and endless retargetting. While it’s frustrating, it throws light on the fact that student data is still jumbled, redundant, or even mismanaged chunks of information.

Zoho SalesIQ has ready-to-use integrations with major CRM tools, help desk software, email marketing tools, analytics software, and just about everything else you use on a regular basis. This gives you a holistic view of customer data, and avoids any missteps in data management and student communication.

Widgets let institutions create custom app integrations to bring favourite apps inside SalesIQ, so you can view and manage the data right from within the app. Users can also avoid redundancies by adding an auto-sync feature to the widget, to sync all the data changes in the respective apps.

We hope this blog helps you shape a more successful student engagement strategy. Please let us know what you think in the comments below. If you have any additional ideas, we’d love to hear them too!