Successful admission professionals know that developing a connection with a student can greatly increase his or her commitment to the college and improve the likelihood of enrollment. In the midst of yield season, they know that strengthening that bond is crucial.
In our most recent nationally co-sponsored study, The Excitement Factor, we asked 12,000 college-bound students if the colleges they were considering had taken a personal interest in them at any point in the recruiting process. The response was shocking. Two-thirds said “No” or “Don’t Remember” and in our view “Don’t remember” is the same as “No.” (If you want a copy of the full report when it’s released, just click here.)
We discovered in the preceding study, Your Value Proposition, that excitement about attending is a more powerful driver of college selection than cost or perceived quality of the institution. Excitement is an emotion that is rooted in how someone feels about the college or university. If the student does not feel that the college has taken a personal interest in them their level of excitement diminishes.
You may have heard the saying that “someone may forget what you said and forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” Showing a personal interest in each student makes them feel good about the college and it has a strong positive correlation to yield.
Smaller colleges have an advantage in that they can more easily establish a one-to-one connection with a prospective student but that doesn’t mean that large colleges that recruit thousands of students cannot also give prospective students the sense that the institution cares about them as an individual. This is typically done by providing great customer service so that students can easily get what they need, when they need it, from people who seem delighted to provide it to them. This commitment and practice has a measurable impact on yield.
Longmire and Company uses our Service Quality Management (SQM) tool to regularly assess the pre-enrollment customer service provided to prospective students by colleges and universities, large and small. The impact on yield of delivering a high level of customer service is astonishing.
SQM and the data collected in the Excitement Factor study show how important it is for an institution to deliver sustained and quality contact with students in each stage of the funnel. I can’t emphasize the word “quality” enough.
It’s easier than you think to measure the pre-enrollment customer service that you’re providing and how it impacts your yield rates. Many of our clients go through the exercise of measuring customer service across all brand touch points so that they can make an objective case for change to all of the departments that are not providing an ideal, or at least acceptable, level of service. Most people who work on a college campus understand the need to grow or improve enrollment. They often just don’t know how to do it. That’s why we always say that if you don’t measure it you can’t manage it.
Do you want to maximize yield? Measure and manage the way you communicate and respond to students and parents throughout the entire recruiting cycle. Do this and you’ll reap enormous benefits.
Bob Longmire is President of Longmire and Company, Inc. He is a recognized expert on the topic of how prospective students and parents form their college selection decisions – and how colleges can use that knowledge to grow and control their enrollment. He can be reached at (913) 492-1265, ext 709 or at blongmire@longmire-co.com.
