One very easy yet often overlooked strategy for keeping tabs on your prospective student experience is Retail Compliance Auditor. As of this writing, we’ve been in the business for almost 10 years now and have learned a lot about how to “shop” a wide variety of institutions: traditional, non-traditional, public, private, big, small, etc.

With all of our experience, we have honed in on one particular interaction within the admissions process which has the best return on investment to focus on: the initial inquiry. By simply checking on how easily students can get in touch with you and what type of response they receive, you will uncover things that your team may be doing very well and probably some opportunities for improvement that weren’t previously aware of.

• How is your team answering the phone?
• How is your team responding to inbound emails or form fills?
• How friendly and approachable is your team coming across?
• Is the prospective student able to get their questions answered?
• Are they being ushered through the process to the next step?

These are questions you may already have in your mind, and you may have some other means of trying to answer these questions. Retail Compliance Auditor, even a few times per month, will give you an objective and detailed answer to these questions and many more so that you can provide the training and coaching needed to make an impact on your conversion rate. You will certainly be surprised by the affordability of this approach, and we don’t lock our clients into any long-term contracts so there is very limited risk.

Please contact us if you’d like to see some sample reports and we would also be happy to conduct one free mystery shop if you are interested in pursuing a regular program with us!

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We are pleased to share the news of a partnership between CampusFeedback, a Goodwin Hospitality company, and Campus Share, offering clients an innovative way to measure higher education enrollment systems and processes, including marketing and communications efforts. Now institutions can take advantage of Retail Compliance Auditor methodologies to collect valuable data regarding the interactions between prospective students and admissions websites, materials, and personnel. Services offered through this partnership are already helping colleges and universities manage enrollment processes more effectively. Our data collection, assessment, and remediation packages have helped institutions ensure that prospects and other constituents have a positive experience that reflects appropriately on the institutional brand.

CampusFeedback provides Retail Compliance Auditor services for higher education to measure and monitor experiences throughout the student lifecycle. Campus Share consultants have extensive experience in higher education enrollment management and marketing and provide consulting services to colleges and universities for customer service strategy and remediation plans. Together, they provide higher education institutions process assessment, market research methods, and actionable plans to improve admissions processes and ultimately increase enrollments.

Customer experience is critical for college admissions leaders to manage and continuously improve. There is more competition than ever fighting for the same pool of potential students each year; if your institution doesn’t stand above the rest, prospective students will quickly turn to the campus where they had a more positive experience. Students, with help from their families, are choosing where they will spend the next 4 years of their life; if their first experience with you isn’t great, convincing them life on campus will be better is an uphill battle.

To date our partnership has identified many key points from working with institutions across the country. Some of the findings include:

• Substandard customer service is prolific across institutions.
  • Admissions reception and phone processes are often a barrier to a positive first impression.
  • Phone transfer processes tend to be unnecessarily cumbersome and can lose prospects.
  • Admissions personnel tend to engage prospects within institutional policy contexts as opposed to understanding prospects’ needs and developing relationships.
• Often there is a non-strategic approach to prospect engagement. Institutions do not approach interactions with prospects with specific goals and objectives in place to further qualify prospects and move them through the admissions funnel.
• Admissions offices tend to have a disconnect between how they want to be perceived and how they are perceived based on their customer service performance.

The mission of this partnership is to help higher education adapt their mind set to provide superior customer service to convert prospects into enrolled students at a higher rate. It does this through providing colleges and universities with:

• Customer service strategy development
• Design of the tailored Retail Compliance Auditor questionnaire template
• Interpretation and presentation of findings
• Remediation recommendations and reports
• Site visits and staff presentations and trainings

Pairing Retail Compliance Auditor research methodologies with actionable remediation plans allows institutions to see dramatic results quickly. For more information, please contact info@360intel.com.

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We recently chatted with Maria Jump, Assistant Vice President of Student Services at Colorado State University – Global Campus. CSUG is a 100% online university that was founded about 10 years ago and focuses on non-traditional students. Offering Bachelors, Masters, and Certificate programs, the average age of its students is 35 and most are working part of full time in addition to studying for their education.

As an online only school, they prioritize student service above all else since they miss the face-to-face interactions. As such they have implemented Retail Compliance Auditor programs across various services to monitor and evaluate how they are doing internally, as well as how vendor partners are servicing their student body.

CSUG has always surveyed students to get first-hand feedback on services and interactions. However, they found survey data was only telling part of the story. It was ideal for garnering sentiment toward a vendor, or the student’s perception of a service, but it didn’t allow for them to know the areas of improvement to optimize processes and offerings to continuously improve. They need to constantly evaluate processes and identify gaps to provide the level of service the CSUG brand promises.

Retail Compliance Auditor allows them to control actions to monitor and evaluation specific actions and services. For example, student feedback was overwhelming positive regarding a vendor partner that provided tutoring services. However, Retail Compliance Auditor data provided insight into specific touch points and interactions that allowed for process improvements and better service. This allowed them to take their good service to great.

CSUG is looking forward to expanding their Retail Compliance Auditor program across all their services – enrollment, advising, website, library, etc. As Jump states, “Everything starts with the student. Increased enrollments, higher revenue, everything starts with the students having the best experience possible.”

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