Enrollment Center Case Study
Introduction
One of the world’s largest and most diverse education providers, The Client offers myriads of educational services to students, universities, and businesses. One of The Client’s subsidiaries focuses solely on providing language courses and higher education programs in North America, Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia. Recently, The Client’s subsidiary decided to overhaul its university application process by using better database management, tracking, and analytics. Enter iSchoolConnect’s Enrollment Center Platform.
iSchoolConnect (iSC) aims to serve enterprises, universities, and recruiters using its expertise in building assistive AI products. One of these products - The Enrollment Center - helps organizations tap into superior technology so they can automate their recruitment processes and manage partner schools, advisors, agents, and students.
Problem Statement
The Client faced a three-fold problem. The foundational issue was an inefficient database. There was a need to not only create a comprehensive list
of The Client’s partner schools but also to automatically filter this list based on various parameters. Solving this problem would mean that The
Client could create personalized links of its partner school programs for students and agents alike.
The second need was to deepen the relationship between The Client and the students it serves. A Student Portal, where a student could shortlist
universities, upload & grade documents, take interviews, and track her status, was needed for The Client advisors to view and update. There was also
a requirement to involve The Clients Agent Partners in this process while also managing a smooth correspondence with them.
Consequently, a single platform with a sturdy database, and well-connected Student, Advisor & Agent Portals, was called for. It was vital for the platform to generate accurate reports and analytics.
Business Solution
Keeping the scope of the complication in mind, iSC rolled out its solution in five phases.
The beginning of Phase One, which focussed solely on optimizing The Client’s database and its representation, led to the creation of a white-labeled directory. This new, improved database went on to include an additional number of 212 partner schools and all the programs they offer over an already exhaustive list of 4000 universities. This list could now be filtered on the basis of customized parameters, some of which included GPA, location, school type, and language level.
The second part of Phase One set out with the aim to rope in The Client’s agent partners to this new database. Through a dedicated Admin View, they could browse, filter, and recommend programs to students from this university database. These custom recommendations could be manual or generated automatically by the platform. Agents could also assign and manage their own advisors. These also included in-country advisors provided to The Client through iSC’s strong international network. The advisors could browse and recommend programs to students as well. But with the security limitations in view, they’d only be able to add and manage their own specific groups of students. This would allow The Client the required amount of modularity to generate and assign commissions, which may then be viewed by the respective agencies.
Phases Two & Three connected the students with The Client, it’s agent partners, and their advisors. The students who availed The Client’s University Placement Services (UPS) now had access to a separate portal, which could also be viewed by The Client’s admins, as well as the student advisors. This Student View allowed students to browse through the university list and view the recommended programs. At the same time, a student could upload the documents relevant to her application. And the platform automatically updated the student’s application status by keeping track of the emails received. All of this information would be available in the Admin View for the admins and the advisors to see. To streamline the communication between students, their advisors, and the admins, a notification service was also added to the platform. What's more, the platform could interact in several languages apart from English, including Arabic, Mandarin, and Korean.
During the fourth phase, iSC made sure these phases had been efficiently rolled out, thoroughly tested, and were functioning in accordance with the necessary compliance measures.
After this, Phase Five was executed - the timeless features provided by iSC were added to the Platform. Premium users would now be able to access an SOP/Essay grading software (Writing Mentor), a software that analyzes interviews (Video Interview Analyser), and a chatbot (CASIE) designed to answer all possible user queries.
This White-labeled Platform, accessible by The Client at all levels, could perform a thorough analysis and generate a comprehensive track report for The Client to see.
Business Impact
Not only did the assessment center impact The Client’s reach, it entirely changed the organizational structure of The Client’s subsidiary. This led to a drastic change in the effort The Client, and its agencies and advisors had to put in, reducing it by one-sixth. They found the new process faster, transparent, and easy to monitor and analyze.
To the benefit of The Client’s users, the turnaround time for the application process also reduced by a drastic amount of 75%, leading to a revenue growth of close to 35%. The thorough analysis produced by the report steered The Client’s future endeavors in the right direction. Optimizing the advisor and sub-agent networks and helping users choose the best possible university according to their profile, led to a great improvement in The Client’s net promoter score.