Posts Tagged ‘customer service’

Yield Enhancement Series: Give Your Prospects an Oscar-Worthy Red Carpet Treatment

February 18th, 2015

This week marks the 87^th Annual Academy Awards Ceremony, commonly referred to as “The Oscars.” Over 40 million of us are expected to be glued to our televisions, soaking up all the Hollywood glitz and glamour. We know that you have much more important events on your radar right now like organizing dynamic campus visits for your Class of 2015 recruits, but maybe you can do both! Yield-Enhancement-Series

Perhaps Oscar can teach us all a few things about giving Red Carpet Treatment to prospective students and their parents that will make those visits, and all of our interactions, more memorable.

A recent nationwide study conducted by Longmire and Company of nearly 5,000 prospective college students and parents showed that 53% reported that their decision to enroll in a given school was heavily influenced by the level of service they received during the “college shopping” process. The study found that poor service delivery, across any brand touch point, often outweighs other important factors, including strength of academic programs, faculty reputation and even the financial aid. Students and their families believe that the type of service they receive during the college selection process is indicative of the overall service culture of the institution.

Colleges and universities, large and small, public and private, are taking this to heart and adopting a more student-centric approach to campus-wide service, especially during the college shopping process. Our Service Quality Management assessments are industry-fresh and reflect the current demands and expectations of students and parents both pre- and post-enrollment.

Here are a few Oscar-worthy concepts you may want to implement.

Roll out the Red Carpet

One of the highlights of Oscar night is the red carpet entry. Many colleges have designed a special welcome to give their campus visitors that superstar experience. Some have assigned parking spaces and personalized welcome signage. Seeing your name in lights, so to speak, is always a thrill and a sure way to make sure that student knows how important he or she is to you. We know of one college that actually has the parking detail prepped with individual knowledge about the incoming students so that each is met with a customized greeting when they enter the parking lot; “Welcome, Joe, I heard your high school band had an amazing performance at the Rose Bowl this year with you playing the trumpet.”

Don’t Miss the Photo Op

Hollywood knows the importance of a well-timed picture and you can, too. A photo of a prospective student with the school mascot or at a college landmark that they can take home with them at the end of the day, or is mailed the following week with a (handwritten, perhaps?) note of thanks, can have a great and lasting impact.

Rub Elbows with Celebrities

Even Hollywood celebrities can be star-struck when they get the chance to rub-elbows with the actors, directors and producers they have always admired. Make sure your prospective students get to socialize with your campus “celebrities,” too. For Joe, the trumpet player, the celebrity list might include the band director and another trumpet player. The aspiring journalist would most likely enjoy a visit to the school’s newspaper office. Your current student population, your faculty, and the college administration is full of celebrities—enlist their support.

SWAG

Nominees at this year’s Oscars will reportedly get $160,000 in gift items each. If that seems a little rich for your budget, don’t despair. You can leave a lasting impression with your recruits for a whole lot less. Backpacks, t-shirts, mugs, fresh-baked cookies with your logo are just a few of the myriad of items that can be given as a take home gift. Most importantly, make sure the SWAG is meaningful and will invoke the positive memories that you have worked so hard to create. Another Oscar-worthy tip: get local businesses to help defray the cost. Is there an area bakery or candy company who would like to provide goodies for the exposure? You don’t think that the Academy pays for all that SWAG, do you?

If I can help you with your recruiting efforts in any way, please feel free to call or email me. I would love to talk to you about our powerful and effective Yield Enhancement System (YES). My contact information is at the bottom of this post.

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, Customer service, Parents

Tags: admission counselor training admissions admissions customer service admissions success college admissions college branding college enrollment college presidents college recruiting college recruitment customer service customer service training enrollment management higher education marketing higher education value longmire longmire and company Longmire and Company study yield enhancement

Yield Enhancement Series: Personal Interest Equates to Higher Yield

January 27th, 2015

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.

Yield-Enhancement-Series 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.

Continue the conversation on Twitter @LongmireCo. For more information about Longmire and Company’s Yield Enhancement tool click here.

[Subscribe to Versions of Conversion today so you don’t miss any of this highly-valuable information.]

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.

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Posted in Conversion and Yield, Customer service, Organizational development

Tags: admission counselor training admissions admissions success college admissions college enrollment college presidents college recruiting customer service customer service training enrollment management higher education marketing longmire and company Longmire and Company study yield enhancement

Your students want help managing expenses. Will you provide it?

April 15th, 2014

At Longmire and Company, we know a huge opportunity when we see one.

From our recent co-sponsored study on value, this was obvious: parents and students want help in managing ALL of the expenses associated with college. And any college that offers this assistance will definitely stand out from the pack in terms of its overall perceived value.

In the study, Your Value Proposition: How prospective students and parents perceive value and select colleges in the current economy, we asked students and parents if they would find an annual expense management service helpful.

Tablets-on-dollars_300x200 More than 80 percent of the students and parents said they would find it appealing (47 percent said “very appealing”). They see it as a value added service that makes a college more attractive.

Now, for the opportunity – only 20% of students and parents said that colleges specifically addressed how they would maximize their time and investment as a student. Only 34% said they were highly confident they had accurately estimated the true and complete cost of their first year in college (including tuition, books, fees, living expenses, travel and all other associated expenses).

You might think you are already imparting cost information to your students. Surely, your applicants know what the “fixed” expenses are going to be for their education. They know what tuition, stated fees, housing and books will cost.

But we all know that there are many, many other expenses associated with the complete cost of college. Students and parents need help managing all of the unknowns, and here are just a few:

– How much will food cost, if they live off campus, for example?

– How much will extra food cost if the student lives on campus, for that matter?

– What are some resources for buying books at a discount?

– How will student trips to and from home (and the frequency of those trips) drive up costs?

– If students regularly drop classes, how is that going to change their total expense picture?

– How accurately are students estimating their light, gas and water bills if they live off campus?

– What are some of the ways students can live more frugally?

Some colleges we are working with have decided in just the past couple of years to rise to this expense planning challenge and actually add staff to assist students and families. These staffers are available to expense checkups and are available for all kinds of questions. This has had huge impact on the perception of value for those institutions. It makes sense. Students and parents know that many colleges provide health centers to care for students when they get sick. Why wouldn’t they provide financial health centers to help them conserve the limited resource of their money.

Other colleges we work with know their students want this and believe it would be valuable, but they have hesitated because they don’t have the staff or even the physical space for another service. We believe that even with these obstacles, colleges can offer some expense planning help. A simple planning tool in the form of a spreadsheet sent to students and parents at initial enrollment and then annually is very helpful.

And without reinventing the wheel, there are many resources available to colleges from their communities, including local information on housing and utility costs. Many community food banks offer information on meal planning/budgeting and colleges could make this available as well.

However you might provide it, expense management information would be helpful, welcome and valuable to students, and it is definitely worth a look.

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Posted in Conversion and Yield, Customer service, Parents, Research

Tags: admissions customer service college recruiting customer service higher education product development higher education value longmire and company

Putting your Pre-Enrollment Service Improvement Plan into Action

January 9th, 2013

It’s Go Time!
Putting your Pre-Enrollment Service Improvement Plan into Action

If you’ve been following our blog for the last two installments, (thank you!), you realize the substantial impact and potential that pre-enrollment customer service has on your institution’s student recruitment efforts. You’ve taken a baseline assessment of your service delivery across many brand touch points, and you’ve created an actionable plan that identifies key issues for improvement and makes everyone accountable. Nice work! You have already accomplished some very important tasks and laid the groundwork for meaningful change at your college or university. You have a clear idea of where you want your organization to be, and now it’s time to start making your way there. The process of transforming the way your organization operates for the better can be both exciting and at times overwhelming, so we have compiled some useful tips for executing your Pre-Enrollment Service Improvement Plan. There are essentially three key components to keep in mind for optimal plan implementation:

1) Spread the Word
Share the findings from your baseline customer service delivery measurements, and also your clearly articulated goals, with everyone on campus. That means administrators, faculty, groundskeepers, the school mascot, everyone. Each and every person at your institution will have a role in making prospective students feel welcomed and wowed, so it’s key that they are all well-informed and apprised of the plan.

In this day and age of social media, it’s not too difficult to spread the word on the things you do to make prospective students and parent feel great. In addition to creating a formal internal communication announcement, feel free to Facebook and tweet away! Going viral can work to your advantage in this case.

2) Involve
Engage every person on campus in the plan with clear and actionable instructions and objectives. Express to each person how key their role is, and offer specific ways they can get involved towards helping the institution improve its customer service. For example, one of our very successful clients presents every visiting prospective student and family member a bright red Welcome Packet at the beginning of their campus tour and asks them to keep it with them throughout the day. Every employee, professor and even other students know that they should go out of their way to welcome and help those bearing the Red Folder. Research at that campus shows that even though the prospects didn’t know that they were particularly visible, they felt that they had just experienced one of America’s most friendly and helpful campuses.

Another payoff of including everyone in the master plan is greater cohesiveness and engagement within the school community. Working towards a common goal together will elicit the kind of infectious school spirit and pride that will make your college a desirable place to be.even though the prospects didn’t know that they were particularly visible, they felt that they had just experienced one of America’s most friendly and helpful campuses.

3) Reinforce
Call out positive behavior. Remember gold stars from grade school? They were effective because everyone likes to be recognized and appreciated for his or her efforts. Have a grownup gold stars system in place to identify and acknowledge exemplary service. Catch folks doing the right thing and celebrate the act. When a groundskeeper is taking particular care to make the campus look good; when the switchboard operator is helping with a smile on her/his face and in her/his voice; when a professor takes the extra minute to visit with a student; applaud the action. Newsletters, bulletin boards, a special recognition email all can be used to acknowledge excellence in pre-enrollment service. This is another opportunity to utilize the power of social media to broadcast good works and kudos. Give every member of your school the opportunity to be a campus rock star, and they will embrace the challenge.

If you follow these tips and get everyone engaged in improving the pre-enrollment experience, your campus will soon be buzzing with excitement and radiating excellence and positive energy that are impossible not to notice. You will likely find that your campus becomes a place where others want to be, and also becomes a source of greater pride for those who already call it home.

Longmire and Company conducts pre-enrollment customer service surveys for colleges across the country. We are more than happy to share the nationally aggregated data we’ve collected and initiatives that colleges have successfully implemented to deliver improved customer service. Just give us a call at (913) 492-1265 or send us a request using our Contact Us page.