Posts Tagged ‘customer service training’

Uncovered: Surprising Ways to Build a Stronger Bond with Prospective Students

May 20th, 2015

In our most recent nationally co-sponsored study, The Excitement Factor!, 12,000 college-bound students shared insights with us about the ways colleges made them feel welcomed and wanted. We uncovered a number of surprises that underscore opportunities for colleges to differentiate themselves and build a stronger bond with the students you are recruiting.
The most shocking discovery came when we asked students if the colleges they were considering had taken a personal interest in them at any point in the recruiting process. Two-thirds said “No” or “Don’t Remember” and in our view “Don’t remember” is the same as “No.” (You can DOWNLOAD the full report now.) Those who did experience personal interest from colleges were very specific in recalling who, what and how that interest was conveyed and how it laid the foundation for a relationship with the college that would lead to their enrollment.

Handwritten notes impress.

Pen and paper seems so “1980’s,” so who would ever guess that Millennials and Gen-Z’s would respond favorably to handwritten notes? But they do! Numerous students shared stories about the “handwritten” notes they had received from admissions counselors, professors, alumni, other students, tour guides and coaches. These notes left a lasting impression and made them feel special (exactly how someone SHOULD feel about the college of their choice). One student summed it up, “Getting a personal letter from a professor I met on campus made me feel like they really wanted me. It was handwritten and he referred back to the conversation we had. That’s when I felt [the college] was the right fit for me.”

The right email CAN have big impact

Perhaps you have heard or taken part in the ongoing debate of the effectiveness of email communications from colleges to prospective students. The study definitely uncovered many nuances in students’ feelings about the subject. And, yes, just as you have suspected, a barrage of impersonal emails cluttering one’s inbox is NOT an effective recruitment tactic. However, well-crafted, personalized emails can be very meaningful and can contribute to building a bond between the student and college. Students cited examples of emails they received that impacted their college decision:

“My admissions counselor emailed me a birthday card. None of my friends got that kind of attention from the colleges they were looking at.”
“After we talked to a professor during a campus visit, my mom and I both got emails from her telling us how much she enjoyed meeting us. That was a deciding factor for me.”
“It seemed like they really knew me. I got emails and invites for campus events and activities that interested me.”

Cultivate the influencers – they may be in unexpected places

You already know that many students are persuaded to attend a particular college because of friends or family members. As a matter of fact, nearly 40% of students participating in The Excitement Factor! study told us that their college choice was influenced by where a parent or sibling attended. But, we also discovered other outside influencers you need to know. Students described interactions with student teachers at their junior and senior high schools, faculty and staff members they met at various summer camps and academic competitions, and even shopkeepers at local stores as individuals who played a significant role in their college selection.

Get and use actionable data

Successful admission professionals know that creating a connection with a student can greatly increase his or her commitment to the college and improve the likelihood of enrollment. They know that building a relationship and continually strengthening a bond is crucial. We will be exploring this subject in great detail in our next national co-sponsored study, “The Relationship Dynamic: How prospective students form a relationship with your college, and why it matters in your ability to grow and control enrollment.” Join a consortium of some of the most highly-respected colleges and universities in the country to find out how YOUR OWN pool of prospective students have or have not formed a relationship with you. Co-sponsors find our studies valuable because of the wealth of information they gain– information they can use to drive action and change. For detailed information, colleges can download detailed information about the study by CLICKING HERE.

Continue the conversation on Twitter @LongmireCo. Be sure to Subscribe to Versions of Conversion today so you don’t miss any of this highly-valuable information.

Karen Full is a highly-respected higher education professional who has held positions in admissions and enrollment management at several institutions in the Midwest and Florida. With her vast experience working with large and small, public and private colleges, Karen brings a valuable perspective to her role as an Enrollment Strategist at Longmire and Company.Call Karen at 913/492.1265 x.711 or email her at kfull@longmire-co.com. Follow Karen on Twitter @KarenAFull.

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Posted in Closing the Sale, Conversion and Yield, Counselor Training, Customer service, Research

Tags: admission counselor training admissions admissions counselors admissions customer service admissions success brand management college college admissions college branding college enrollment college presidents college recruiting college recruitment customer service training enrollment management finding the right college fit higher ed higher education marketing higher education strategies higher education value longmire and company Longmire and Company study recruiting value proposition yield enhancement

Here’s One Way to Differentiate Your College

May 5th, 2015

A recent story by Beckie Supiano in The Chronicle for Higher Education, “Students’ College Choices Aren’t Totally Rational (and That’s OK),” included insights from our most recent nationally co-sponsored study, The Excitement Factor!. Supiano writes, “For many students, choosing where to go to college is, at least in part, an emotional decision. That’s not one more higher-education problem to be solved. It might even be a good thing.” In interviews with industry professionals including college and high school counselors, Supiano reports on the influence of the emotional connection, often referred to as the “AHA!” moment, for a student making his or her college choice.

The most successful college enrollment teams recognize the value of creating an environment that will foster excitement about attending their college. Even so, it can be a challenge in today’s competitive higher-ed marketplace. One of the questions we get asked most often is this: “What is the one thing we can do to differentiate our college?”

The answer is: Take a personal interest in the prospective student.

If you are thinking that is too simple, or that most colleges do this already, two-thirds of prospective students will disagree with you. In truth, most college-bound students say that the colleges they most seriously considered never took a personal interest in them at any point in the recruiting process.

Student excitement about a college is enhanced when they perceive that the college has taken a sincere personal interest in them. And, as a practical matter, the more personal interest you take in a student the more you will find out about his or her unique combination of interests, preferences, desires, anxieties, and aspirations. With that greater understanding you will naturally communicate a unique value proposition. The student will perceive you as unique among their available choices. You will have reached the coveted state of differentiation.

For a significant percentage of students who reached the application or admit stages of the funnel, the college’s personal interest in them, or lack of it, was influential in their college selection decision.

With 36% to 42% of students in the public and private pools, respectively, saying that this was influential in their college selection, it underscores the opportunity for colleges to impact enrollment by demonstrating a personal interest in students across every brand touch point of the institution.

Best Practices: How personal interest is exhibited by the college.

Students respond very favorably to highly personalized, well-crafted emails that address their individual interests. Any type of communication that appears to be genuinely targeted to the individual student is likely to be well received, interpreted as personal and stands out from other colleges.

One student, referring to her multiple interactions with a large public university, said, “From the beginning, the communication felt very personal and made me feel wanted.”

Many students relayed stories of colleges building relationships with them in their sophomore and junior years of high school. They said that personalized individual attention exhibited by the college makes them feel more confident, more important, more wanted, more recognized, and more excited about attending.

There are communication techniques your staff can learn that will help them feel confident about reaching out to their prospective students to ask the right questions. This is one of the core techniques we teach in the Interactive Counselor Training Workshops we hold on college campuses throughout the country. It is also a key component of YES, our Yield Enhancement Tool.

Relationship building isn’t the role of the admissions office alone. Students told us that they responded to personal attention exhibited across all brand touch points on campus; from admissions, to faculty, to financial aid, to anyone who comes into contact with a prospective student, even the landscaper who is helpful in providing directions to a student visiting campus for the first time.

The release of The Excitement Factor! is creating a great deal of thought-provoking discussion among enrollment managers and higher education marketing professionals. The project uncovered a wealth of highly valuable information on how your ability to create student excitement about your college can drive your enrollment. You can DOWNLOAD the report now.

Continue the conversation on Twitter @LongmireCo. Be sure to Subscribe to Versions of Conversion today so you don’t miss any of this highly-valuable information.

Rick Montgomery is as an Enrollment Strategist at Longmire and Company. With over 20 years in higher education marketing, he brings an innovative approach to helping colleges and universities meet their enrollment goals. Rick can be reached at 913/492.1265 x.708 or via email at rmontgomery@longmire-co.com.

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Posted in Closing the Sale, Conversion and Yield, Counselor Training, Customer service

Tags: admission counselor training admissions admissions counselors admissions customer service admissions success college college admissions college branding college enrollment college presidents college recruiting college recruitment customer service training enrollment management higher ed higher education branding higher education marketing higher education strategies Longmire and Company study Students’ College Choices Aren’t Totally Rational (and That’s OK) yield enhancement

Celebrate Decision Day! Then, Use These Insights to Move Forward

April 28th, 2015

What are your plans for May 1, aka College Decision Day? Here is our suggestion: First, give yourself and your team kudos for the months of hard work and the outstanding efforts you put forth to serve the students you recruited while building the best possible incoming class. Next, celebrate those great new students that will be joining your campus family this fall. And then, if you are like the majority of college admissions teams across the country, you’ll go right back to work to secure more admitted students because there is still much work to do.

The truth is that most colleges don’t meet their enrollment goals by May 1. According to the “2014 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Admissions Directors,” only 39% of colleges met their target enrollment by Decision Day in 2014 and industry insiders are projecting that even fewer will do so this year.

decision_day For college admissions counselors and enrollment managers facing this challenge, we have some good news and important insights gleaned from our latest co-sponsored study, The Excitement Factor! Of the 12,000 students participating in the study, 20% committed to the college of their choice after the first of May.

The late enrollers shared many of the same attributes as their peers, of course. But there were some areas where we found distinct differences that may help you in your outreach efforts.

Excitement about Attending: Late enrollers don’t have as high of level of excitement about the college they select and are far less likely to experience a feeling of connection with the college than early enrollers.
College Visits and Applications: Students who enrolled later were far less likely to have visited or toured the college they selected than their peers. Actually, they generally applied to and toured far fewer campuses than the students who made their decision sooner.
Family Ties: Late enrolling students are more likely to choose a college that a family member has attended than other students.
The Cost Factor: The students who enrolled later indicated that cost was slightly more important to them than the students that made their decision earlier.

The late enrollers tended to have lower SAT scores than other students, but otherwise there were no large variances found in the demographics or psychographics of the two groups.

As you review the pool of students still available to you, keep these things in mind. We know that excitement that about attending is a more powerful driver of college selection than cost or perceived quality of the institution and that a tour of your campus can create excitement. Are there students in your pool who haven’t visited your campus yet?

Have you identified potential students with a family connection to your college? In The Excitement Factor!, four in ten students told us that their college choice was influenced by where a parent or sibling attended and late enrollers are even more likely to gravitate to the college that has a family tie for them.

And lastly, if you are looking for a way to really connect with these potential students, we suggest that you make them feel wanted. Two-thirds of college-bound students told us that the colleges they were considering had not taken a personal interest in them at any point in the recruiting process. 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 a student makes them feel good about the college and it has a strong positive correlation to yield.

We help colleges and universities with their recruiting efforts every day, especially now during yield season. If we can help you, please let me know.

Continue the conversation on Twitter @LongmireCo. For more information about Longmire and Company’s Interactive Counselor Training Program, click here. Be sure to Subscribe to Versions of Conversion today so you don’t miss any of this highly-valuable information.

Karen Full is a highly-respected higher education professional who has held positions in admissions and enrollment management at several institutions in the Midwest and Florida. With her vast experience working with large and small, public and private colleges, Karen brings a valuable perspective to her role as an Enrollment Strategist at Longmire and Company. Call Karen at 913/492.1265 x.711 or email her at kfull@longmire-co.com. Follow Karen on Twitter @KarenAFull.

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Posted in Closing the Sale, Conversion and Yield, Uncategorized

Tags: admission counselor training admissions admissions counselors admissions customer service admissions success college college admissions college decision day college enrollment college presidents college recruiting college recruitment customer service training enrollment enrollment management finding the right college fit higher ed higher education branding higher education strategies

Yield Enhancement Series: The Final Push –The Question You MUST Ask Every Prospective Student

March 19th, 2015

[This is Part 5 of the Yield Enhancement Series: The Final Push, offering actionable and effective strategies for the closing weeks of the yield season.]

Do you recall when the iPhone was released? I mean the FIRST one? Maybe you were even one of the hundreds of thousands of people who stood in line (or camped out) in extreme heat, cold or rainstorms, for as long as four days to get their hands on this thrilling new technology. In what was described by many journalists as a “carnival-like atmosphere,” over 270,000 iPhones were sold in the first 30 hours they were available.

What could possibly motivate so many rational people to act in this manner? It was EXCITEMENT, pure and simple. The same kind of excitement that you and your admissions team have been working for months to create within your pool of prospective students.

Don’t underestimate the power of excitement. Consider this: While researching how students and their parents perceive value and make their college selection, we discovered that of the three primary drivers of college selection (cost, perceived quality of the institution and the student’s excitement about attending) excitement about attending was more strongly correlated to likelihood of enrollment – by a factor of two – than the other two drivers.

In our most recent national co-sponsored study, The Excitement Factor, we sampled over 13,000 students to rate their level of excitement (on a 10-high scale) at the point when they made their college selection decision. I use the word “decision” but it’s more like an emotional explosion for so many. Nearly half of the students told us that, at the end point of their college shopping process, their excitement level about their college of choice had reached 9 or 10 on the scale. What enabled them to reach that fever pitch was everything that came before it. The conversations they had with counselors, the campus visit, talking with current students, seeing what their life experiences would be like when they step on campus Day One.

Certainly you and your team have been working for months to create student excitement about your institution; much like Steve Jobs and the Apple team did back in 2007. Every promotional brochure, email, campus tour, press release, personal conversation, every single effort you have put forth to make your class, has been designed to emphasize your college’s unique attributes in a way that will spark the enthusiasm of your prospective students.

Now it is time to ask each and every student in your pool this crucial question: “What is your level of excitement about attending our college?”

If you get the answer you want, terrific, it is time to close the deal. But, if not, follow-up with questions that will lead you to your end game:

“Is there another college that excites you?”
“What about that school is exciting to you?”
“What would amp up your enthusiasm for us?”
“What can I show you here that you really want to see?”
“Who can I introduce you to that will tell you what it’s like to attend here?”

1_Key_Question_300x172 The reason most counselors don’t ask these questions is because they are afraid to. Counselors often hold themselves back from asking penetrating questions because they’re afraid students will perceive them as being intrusive. That’s so unfortunate. For both the counselor and the student.

Admissions counselors who employ the direct approach tell us that they are often surprised by the answers they get when they specifically ask about a student’s level of excitement. Not only do they get a real-time assessment of what the student is feeling, but they frequently uncover the ONE THING that will turn an admitted prospect into an enrolled student. It’s simple, effective and a WIN-WIN for all. That’s something to get excited about!

Asking direct questions about how a student feels and how excited (or not) they are about your college is crucial to understanding what you need to do to generate the kind of excitement that will lead to enrollment.

So, try this: The next time you’re talking to a prospective student, ask this simple question, “On a 10-high scale, what’s your excitement level about coming to our school?” Give them permission to be honest by telling them that they won’t hurt your feelings. If you get an answer that’s anything less than a 10, follow up with the sincere and honest question, “What would get you to a 10?” Listen to what they say. Listen for how you can help them.

We help colleges and universities with their recruiting efforts every day, especially now during yield season. If we can help you, please let me know.

If you would like a copy of our Excitement Factor report as soon as it is released you can CLICK HERE to send us an e-mail to put you on the distribution list.

RHL_Photo_100x100 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.