Generating meaningful student engagement is challenging. The decision to enroll, stay, or donate to your institution is built on the relationships forged between faculty, staff, and students. And those relationships begin in the admissions process. 

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Recently our partners at Twillio noted that 42% of Millennials and 47% of Gen Z are feeling daily digital fatigue, so how can we generate more student engagement without simply injecting more digital communication into our strategy?

Instead of doing more, we need to do better. It’s higher ed’s job to engage prospects in an appropriate, human and responsible way. We may always stress “delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.” It’s now time to add “in the right channel” to that mantra.

The Channel That Builds Student Engagement & Relationships

So how do we connect, engage and build long-lasting relationships between students and institutions? We know the familiar channels of yesterday and today—email and telephone—aren’t going anywhere, but they have their downsides, especially when your student is the one who wants to initiate the conversation. It’s up to us to meet them where they are.

Where are students when they have a problem or a question? Likely on your website looking for how to register for courses or trying to find out much tuition is. Or maybe they’re in your online application and have questions about who can submit a letter of recommendation or what counts as a “job.” 

So the best place to ask and engage that question is right then and there on your website or in the application portal. That’s where live chat comes in. 

You can give students the answer they need to take the next step, increase their satisfaction, and strengthen your relationship with that student all at once. But that’s not all. Let’s explore the six ways live chat is changing college recruiting and how it can help you take what you’re already doing and make it better!

6 Ways Live Chat is Changing College Recruiting for The Better

1. Connect Instantly

The first way live chat is changing college recruiting for the better is that it’s changing our ideas on timing—and timing is everything.

When you look at another medium like email, there are so many steps that the student has to jump through: formatting, sending, waiting, replying, accidentally deleting it, and waiting some more. We all know firsthand what can happen when an email message gets stuck in a loop, being passed on to one department and then the next. It’s frustrating for students, and it’s frustrating for each department.

The antiquated forms of student communication and engagement won’t cut it anymore. We need to meet students where they are. Students of all ages are texting and DM’ing far more often than checking their Gmail, formatting an email, or taking the time even to consider waiting for a message. 

Today’s students have the world at their fingertips instantly, and mediums like texting, search, social media, and video are not just where things are going; it is where we are, so it is time to catch up.

2. Streamline Channels

Remember when it was a good choice to have multiple generic email addresses? Admissions@, Graduate@, Recruit@, Scholarships@? It was a good choice until we realized the time it took to manage them all! For many schools, it can become too much too quickly. 

If you’re looking to consolidate, set up an auto-reply driving the student to a landing page with a chat and an RFI, so they get answers to their questions much faster than sending an email. This way, you streamline multiple avenues into one centralized system to manage all inbound questions. 

When you streamline those avenues into one, you can utilize a platform like Element451 to manage all of your communication in one place. 

The inboxes feature in Conversations can now funnel all your emails into Element 451, ensuring all your student communication is accessible, and you can stop hopping back and forth between your inbox and your CRM. 

3. Collect Intelligence

“Did you get my transcript? When do classes start? What are my next steps?” 

Have you heard these questions coming through your chat over and over again? This is likely an indicator that students aren’t getting or finding the answers they need when they need them. 

Getting the same question 100 times is not just a coincidence, it’s your cue to do something about it. 

This is excellent intelligence to share with your marketing and web teams and can be a key point of collaboration. By developing a strategy for routinely reviewing this information, you can determine where to surface it on your institution’s website. 

The outcome might be adjusting web copy on key pages, adding new pages, or even making changes to your site navigation. No matter what you do, don’t let the data you are collecting in live chat go unused! Your prospects will thank you, and your staff will thank you!

4. Personalize Engagement

Meeting students where they are in the formats that they want and expect will not only make them feel seen and valued, but it will allow your message to be received, understood, and remembered. 

The format itself can make the difference between a prospect receiving and retaining your message or not. For example, 95% of a message is remembered when it’s in a video vs. just 10% in plain text. Consider sending back answers via a short video message and see how the conversation changes completely.

Another idea to incorporate into your strategy is to give your student ambassadors access and host an AMA or “Ask Me Anything” session that is student-to-student, directly from your CRM. 

Doing it via the CRM means the information is automatically logged in the student's profile, and doing this a couple of times throughout the admission cycle will allow you to generate additional insights to share back with your marketing teams.

Consider doing the same with faculty, advising, study abroad, etc. Live chat should easily facilitate assigning incoming messages to these individuals, and the opportunities to engage other areas and units on campus are endless. 

5. Automate Everything

Gone are the days of manually assigning students and manually sending out messages. The time is now to automate! 

Our Conversations feature inside Element451 has the ability to create custom rules to customize actions from assigning people, auto replying, adding participants, creating custom tags, and more. 

Creating these automations is incredibly simple and can be set to conditions that are based on a segment that you’ve created, certain date parameters, and even particular inbound conditions like who the message was sent from and to and what type of content is included in the message.

6. Chatbots for Everyone

Bots have become standard across the all sorts of sectors including banking, retail, software support and, of course, higher education. 

There are many off-the-shelf chatbots that look up answers from a knowledge base, search your website, or provide decision-tree style help.  With these types of bots, you can see 70- 80% of conversations being able to resolved in real time. 

Why else would you want to use a bot? 

• They are always on. Bots on during nights, weekends, and holidays means that people can get answers to question when they have them, not just when your office is open. 
  
• They can be the “frontline” for your live chat staff, taking care of the repetitive, easy to answer questions, and freeing your staff to have more meaningful conversations and connections with your learners. 
  
• They don’t replace people, they free people up to do better work. 

Creating Personal Connections Between Students and Schools Through Technology

We hope our six ways allow you to see all the benefits of implementing live chat for your institution. And while it won’t fully replace other channels—especially if you are using Element451’s Conversations module that combines all those channels into one unified experience for your staff—it is a hugely important channel to add or use more of at your school.  

Click here to get a personalized look at Element451 in action and see what it can do for your institution.