Our client is one of the UK’s largest Further Education establishments. They offer a diverse curriculum to over 30,000 students and are one of the largest employers in the area.

What they needed

Our client was in one of the most important periods of the college calendar and needed to confirm how many potential learners would actually be joining them in the next academic term. With the new student year fast approaching, a number of potential learners had been interviewed and accepted for a place but were still yet to fully enrol.

As with previous years, our client had an internal enrolment team managing all inbound and outbound calls to potential learners to confirm their enrolment. Although they were using the same level of resource as before, due to a shift in communications and a greater amount of in-depth conversations with students, the amount of time on the phone responding to inbound calls had increased.

This meant that from a resource and capacity point of view, our client was under pressure to make the number of outbound calls required to reach the 2,000 student learners left to contact. With the deadline for enrolment within the next week, they needed a high-quality solution to ensure all calls were managed as effectively as possible, minimising disruption to the internal team.

What we did

Aware of the pressure on the internal team to secure student enrolments in a limited timeframe, we were able to understand requirements and integrate with the internal team to set up an engagement campaign within 24 hours from our first point of contact.

We contacted potential learners to qualify their intention to enrol, liaising directly with the internal admissions team to hot transfer qualified enrolment bookings in real-time.Throughout engagement we were able to classify any reasons for students not continuing with their enrolment, which demonstrated how essential timing was in securing the maximum number of places at the college. Whether this was because they were going to a different college, or had chosen to take a job instead, we communicated any other potential routes to engage with them, such as incorporating an apprenticeship course within their new work role, providing them with opportunity to still study at the college. This enabled the admissions team to use their time effectively, arranging enrolment slots and answering questions so all students were suitably engaged. From an insight point of view, any additional information on other colleges or course preference was communicated with our client so that they could address any gaps in their current offering.

In addition to this, our client was currently investing in a new CRM system that would gradually be introduced across multiple departments in the coming year. It was therefore important to ensure that all data collected was built into the database in a usable format, ready to be transferred to their new CRM. We classified all outcomes appropriately to ensure our client had a clean, high quality database of prospect outcomes.

What we achieved

We were able to contact the full database of over 2,000 students within the short timeframe, leaving our client with a fully populated database of contacts and list of students enrolled for the coming year. Following our engagement, 89% of students we spoke to, who were still deciding on enrolment options, were successfully transferred to the admissions team to progress. We now operate as a continuous overflow capacity at particularly busy times of the college year.

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