As the enrollment leader for your school or institution, do you have a strong understanding of the experience that your prospective students go through in the admissions process? As you know, there are many touchpoints along the way involving both human and technological resources, and any one of them can be make or break in terms of properly representing your brand with consistency.
One very easy yet often overlooked strategy for keeping tabs on your prospective student experience is mystery shopping. 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. Mystery shopping, 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!