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Solution
The online educator knew it needed to listen to the interactions between students and contact centers agents to find missed opportunities. The company evaluated the possibility of handling this in-house but ultimately decided to rely on the experts, so it contracted with HyperQuality to develop a program to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the agents and their scripts, and to uncover areas for improvement.
Results
HyperQuality’s data and analysis gave this online educator the data it required to make significant changes to it coaching model and overall structure. The advice has provided for overall improvement in enrollment and starts.
One of the world’s largest online educators boasts some enrollment statistics that, frankly, put it at the head of the online-college class. Consider: The percentage of students who enroll at an online college or university but do not actually start is, on average, about 30%; at this institution, that figure is less than 10%. Clearly, students who are accepted, maintain a high level of excitement and enthusiasm about attending one of the country’s premier online institutions.
The quality of the school’s academic programs is undoubtedly part of the reason for this success. Offering online instruction in a variety of subject areas and disciplines, the university’s online degrees and distance learning programs are unique, based on their “emphasis on teaching you how to absorb and apply the real-world knowledge that will be meaningful in your professional life.” Given that the school’s typical student is in his or her mid-30s and is a working adult looking to improve skill-sets and marketability, this practical approach to education makes perfect sense. However, equal credit for these impressive numbers must be laid at the feet of the online academic advisors who qualify prospective students via telephone, according to the university’s director of contact center solutions.
“Many of our competitors will enroll just about anyone,” he said. “We try to get our agents to demonstrate that the student is right for our school and vice versa. To do that, you have to ask the right questions and pay close attention to the answers.”
Yet while the numbers of enrollees who showed up on the first day of class has always been remarkable, the school last year reached a plateau in its actual enrollment figures. The time had arrived to shine a spotlight on the interview process – not so much on the numbers of interviews but, rather, their overall quality. “We needed to identify key areas within these interactions that would help to improve our student acquisition,” said the director. “What’s more, we wanted to improve our sales metrics by identifying areas within the call that may have signaled missed opportunities. Ultimately, we felt confident that this effort would not only help us increase our enrollment numbers, it would also have a spillover effect by further improving student retention rate, as well as understanding why our students leave.” While the flattening of the school’s enrollment numbers was certainly the catalyst for such an exercise, the director contended that this exercise was a long time coming. “We’ve never really had a reliable way to explain our enrollment trends and sales metrics,” he said. “It has traditionally been driven off of our quantitative data. While we take great pride in the quality of our educators, the University’s main department, admissions, is in the enrollment business; their job is to get people to ‘buy’ our product. It’s similar to any type of sales account. “We get really specific with metrics around how well we convert the different stages of our pipeline, whether we first talk to a lead, interview a lead, or the actual application process,” he continued. “But the element we were missing is the quality part: why certain parts of the process work, why other parts do not.”
The obvious approach was to listen in on some of the interactions between prospective students and contact center agents; the hard part was figuring out who should do it. “We have a compliance department that listened to calls to ensure that regulatory guidelines were being followed,” the director said. “Our first thought was to simply expand this internal group, but after running the numbers, it became apparent that it would be more economical to go with a third-party solution. We knew that the learning curve would be much longer than we could afford to wait. This group was not used to listening to performance guidelines, and it would have been proven extremely challenging to them.”
Even if the group was up-to-speed from a technical perspective, the number of calls they were monitoring comprised a statistically invalid sample size for a quality program. “We wanted to do it the right way,” he said. “It was clear we just didn’t have the infrastructure to help us see the ROI that we were looking for.”
Of course, even before deciding who would listen to the calls, it was imperative to find a recording solution. The university settled on a third-party solution which was rolled-out to all four contact center locations. The next – and arguably more critical – step was to identify a group that would evaluate the calls. After conducting a search on outsourced quality assurance companies, the director found Seattle-based HyperQuality, Inc., an independent quality assurance firm with a focus on quality customer contacts, overall customer experience and employee satisfaction. Through discussions with HyperQuality representatives, the director became convinced that the company had the call monitoring experience – and the analytical expertise – to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the contact center agents’ interactions.
“Prior to engaging HyperQuality, we ran a model around our interview time,” he said. “One crucial piece of information we uncovered was a strong correlation between length of interview and conversion rate. Our analysis showed that when an interview is 20 minutes or less, the conversion rate was low. Conversely, when the call was extended to 45 minutes or more, the rate shot up to around 90%.” The solution, naturally, was to extend the average time of each call. The problem was that no one at the university was quite sure how to accomplish this goal. According to the director, management always knew – anecdotally - that the interviews were missing important aspects of the calls’ content. He contended that the most deficient area was the one most integral to the call’s success: connect and discover. During that process, the university advisors build value and try to ascertain why the caller is looking to enhance his or her education. In addition, the advisor is helping the prospect dream of what life will be like with a college degree in hand.
“We have to ask a number of questions in the segment; some require straightforward answers, others are more open-ended,” he explained. “We ask whether they’ve completed their high school diploma and whether they have computer access. But we also ask about prior schooling. A lot of our prospects have attended universities before, so we ask what made them stop and why is this a good time to start again. Basically we’re painting a picture for the prospective student of a better, happier life with more earning potential,” said the director. “We’re not just selling the school, we’re selling the benefits of attending the school. But a significant percentage of our advisors were not doing that effectively.”
While this aspect of the call is critical, there were others that needed improvement as well. “We have another section called ‘tie-in to the solution,’” he said. “This is where the admission advisor explains what the university is all about, the features, the benefits, the programs, and what life is like at an online university. But a good percentage of our advisors were skipping that part, too.
“Overall, we needed our advisors to better qualify the people they talked with,” he said. “If they’re not qualifying prospects appropriately, it’s hurting them on the back end. While we want as many people as possible to enroll, we’re far more concerned about how many people start. We’re more interested in quality enrollment than just seeing who we can get to sign up.”
A tall task, but one that HyperQuality was more than prepared to undertake. HyperQuality began monitoring calls and placing them into the affiliated system for recording and further evaluation. The company collected quantitative data to support the university’s suspicions about the troublesome areas. University management is also using HyperQuality's performance and workflow management SaaS solution, to acquire monitoring results. These results are turned into actionable items that supervisors can use to coach university advisors to improve their performance – and more specifically, connect more effectively with the prospect. “HyperQuality has been able to give us exposure around the areas that we constantly reinforce or train,” he said. “It has helped us to build some sophisticated analytics around low quality scores. In the end, HyperQuality’s monitoring efforts have provided us the quantitative data we required to make significant changes to our coaching model and overall structure.”
As one might expect, this kind of program represents a significant culture change, one that some employees are able to embrace more quickly than others, the director noted. “Frankly, not everyone believed that if they followed the revised script it was going to translate to a higher conversion rate,” he said. “It wasn’t until the beginning of February 2007 that we started really seeing a lift in quality scores. But we knew that results wouldn’t be achieved overnight. For most of us, we understood that we were in this for the long haul.” The director added that the university has launched some internal initiatives around the monitoring program to generate enthusiasm about the program: balloons, flyers, newsletters, even a “Build a Dream” campaign to highlight the importance of building the dreams of students interested in attending the university. In the end, though, it comes down to the willingness of his advisors to act upon the areas of improvement that HyperQuality has helped identify. “The process of enrolling in college takes time and requires an enormous amount of effort, follow up, and organization,” said the director. “Knowing what you’re doing right and wrong is essential.”
“With our anecdotal evidence as a foundation, HyperQuality was able to quantify and explain how to increase our enrollment. It’s up to our people to be good students and use this knowledge to enhance their performance.”
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