The advent of distance learning is revolutionizing higher education. For many, it is the price point of an online school that attracts students and their parents. For others, it is the convenience of being able to study on their own time without having to be in a certain place at a certain time, which can easily interfere with work hours. For a student that must work and go to school, online learning can mean the difference between being able to attend college or being left on the sidelines.
This also means that educators must devise ways to not only attract students, but also to be able to provide them the information they need to get them on board and enrolled. Institutions that provide the most effective communication tools even before a student is officially a student are the schools that will eventually realize the highest enrollment. But what can you do that you haven’t done already?
Telephony
Telephony is communication, whether with a traditional landline, voice over IP (VoIP) or the cloud. Depending on the type of phone system you have will determine what features you are able to offer your students and their parents to keep them engaged and happy with your institution. Happy students and happy parents translate into word-of-mouth marketing which in turn leads to increased enrollment.
What can a different phone system do for you? You have voicemail, you have various extensions to contact enrollment, registration, and financial services, what else could a phone possibly do that would help you?
Cloud Phone Tools
Many online institutions have implemented phone systems hosted on cloud to link their website with their phone. If a student or parent is on your website and has a question about a course or financial aid, with cloud technology you can offer a “Call Now” button. When the parent or student clicks on it, the telephony system automatically calls one of your agents and links their phone to the phone of the person who clicked the button. The calls are linked and the agent can answer the question.
If the agent is busy, you can configure the link to call the student back and give them a message that states that the agent is busy and they will receive a call. And if you don’t have a website, don’t worry. The advertisements that you have offline can be written with a number to call that will connect an agent or let the student know the call was received and they will receive a call back.
Parents
Don’t forget the parents in all of this, after all, just because they sign their child up for the school doesn’t mean they are now finished with it. They may want to know about their child’s progress before the report card comes out telling them the child missed some tests and is nor behind the rest of the class. With virtual phone systems, you can set up the parents to receive text messages about upcoming tests, progress reports, events at the school and even financial payment reminders.
Other Advantages
From a marketing standpoint, cloud telephony is vital to help you track what strategies work and what don’t. If you advertise your educational services using multiple mediums you can set up different virtual numbers for each advertisement. The cloud telephony has software that tracks these numbers and can give you details about the success or failure of each strategy. This allows you to concentrate your marketing efforts where they will have the greatest impact. If you offer a discount on one and a refund on another, you’ll quickly learn which offer makes the most business sense.
Another advantage to cloud telephony is that you can implement an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system on your phone system and integrate it with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. This lets you tailor calls by the profile of the caller. If it is a parent the agent handling the call will know how many students the parent has enrolled, what they are studying, possibly how they are doing? This makes the parent feel that they are receiving personal attention from a school that understands them.
For students, the same software can provide the agent with the same types of information making the call more pleasant because the caller has less to explain to the agent. In addition, the calls can be recorded for training purposes and to better tailor the software involved to meet the needs of the customer population.
One final advantage is that a cloud system can give you a toll free number for your institution so prospective parents and students and current parents and students can call you without incurring additional costs themselves.
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