How do Mobility Solutions create personalized student experiences with the help of Data and Analytics in the Higher Education Industry?

Technology evolution has influenced all the industries. Amongst them, the education industry is going through vital changes at every point. Evolution of the internet, electronic devices, and mobile phones have accelerated this growth.

Mobility Solutions in Higher Education

The Higher Education(HE) institutions are undergoing massive changes in operations and communication with students, teachers, parents, alumnus, staffs and prospects. Because students demand more tailored learning journey, individualised attention, and services. To serve these demands, institutions must become more efficient and start to implement technological tools which shall make things easier, manageable, and support in decision-making with the help of data and analytics.

In today’s education ecosystem, students are energetic, mobile, and tech-savvy. They are always connected to the internet. Mobility solutions such as CRM, mobile applications, and cloud solutions, etc., helps to automate and manage communications with prospects, customers, staffs and teachers “on the go”. These systems must be implemented to meet the needs of the new generation in an efficient way while cost-effectively addressing the requirements of the college and everyone in their community.

With the help of mobility software’s, institutions can bring together data elements from various sources to create a 360° view of each student and prospects. It activates information access smoother, delivers a personalised experience, creates targeted campaigns and sends messages in a timely manner. Moreover, student management solutions can be used to predict student’s success rate by tracking their activity and performance.

Needs and Benefits

Mobility solutions in HE assist colleges/institutions to manage their students, staffs, teachers and prospects on a single platform efficiently. The various needs and benefits are -

1.    Student Life Cycle Management (Contact Management)

At present, students are neither connected nor engaged through any of the channels or touch points as part of their study life. This infers that there is no particular method to communicate and serve the students based on their progress in the course.

Mobility solutions are designed to impact on every connection in the student life cycle and flawlessly integrate with institution resources and systems. Also, it helps to track every aspect of an individual student life cycle. With the help of data and analytics, institutions can now predict the student’s failure or success rates.

 2.    Service and Communication

Faculties and students are exploring the applicability of mobility services that can enhance the learning experience and assistance with research.

Software tools provide faster communications like online resources access, streaming administrative tasks, notify students about class cancellations, grade allocation and etc.

3.    Automation

Emails, social media messages, student alerts and any other type of communications can now be automated in order to speed up the response time. Mobility solutions shall provide workflow automation that takes care of all the follow-up processes.

4.    Recruitment, Marketing and Operations

Recruitments and marketing features help institutions to create targeted recruitment campaigns and help in lead management. Email marketing tools and templates further optimise the student recruitment process. This allows for smarter marketing, forecasting and budget planning, by maximising the ROI of the marketing process.

5.    Help and Support

Any profile or student that is connected to the system can get a help at any time or even contact respective departments, whether it is related to online tutorials/training, email, live chat, fee and exam management, etc.

HE Mobility Solutions

The competition has gone up in the higher education market as the students started to demand more personalised and faster experiences. There are industry-specific and generic mobility solution providers compete in this segment. They are –

Target X

The system is an open source solution which was built on salesforce platform and It helps to manage the complete student lifecycle from inquiry to alumnus.

Data Harvesting - Student CRM

Student CRM is a student recruitment tool that specifically built for the UK HE market. The solution allows institutions to purchase necessary modules based on the needs as part of pricing strategy.

Simplicity (Ascend)

Ascend is made for the recruitment part of the SLC with multi-language capability. Pricing is based on the number of applications registered.

  

Admittor

Admittor is a simple system that offers white labelling option, high-level customization and a tagging system. It activates users to better manage and search the applicant pool with advanced execution options.

Jenzabar (SEM CRM)

Jenzaber is a cloud-based CRM system that has integrated with IBM “Cognos” software which helps from reporting to analysis and metrics. “Dotmailer” integration brings email marketing optimization.

Full Fabric

Full Fabric is popular with its appealing and easy to navigate design. The key features are real-time reporting and google maps integration with a great focus on prospect students.

Azorus

Azorus focuses on recruitment and retains “more of the right students”. The platform has the ability to engage students at all the touch points with the institution, and also have the options to manage lead generation and event creation.

Campus Management (Campus Nexus CRM)

Campus Management is a complete student lifecycle CRM comes with both on-premises and cloud based solutions for the maximum functionality.

Mira Network

Mira Network is a multi-lingual mobility solution market leader in the Nordic Countries that comes with an Office 365 and LinkedIn integrations.

Dream Apply

This solution is specifically designed to manage student admissions with a set of features, such as reporting, student exchange, and agent management.

Maximizer CRM (Student Relate)

The system comes with a lot of functional features such as staff performance tracker along with workflow automation, in-depth real-time reporting, Microsoft tools integrations, and online behavioural tracking.

Hobsons (Radius)

Radius is an admission and enrollment CRM that helps to manage processes from enquiry to application and enrollment by tracking all student connections. This system allows identification of at-risk students, student outcomes, academic advising and online payments.

Proretention (Enrollment CRM)

Proretention is a complete student relationship management solution that comes with various features such as multi-channel communication modes, vendor management, dialer integration and with inbuilt dashboards and reports.

Student Recruitment System (SRS)

The system is built for the Nordic education market. It offers offline access that allows offline data collection and automatic data synchronisation along with ROI insights from each marketing channel.

Future Trends

The importance of mobility solutions for the higher education industry is under continuous development to make learning more real-world & student oriented. The opportunities are higher in this market segment because of more enhanced demands and the popularity of “on the go” services. The Internet and digital transformation are the major causes of growth in the education industry and it is on the rise.

Research and surveys reveal that 59% of Institutions do not use any CRM because of the lack of knowledge on Mobility Solutions along with budget limitations. Surveys indicate that most of the colleges are considering to implement mobility solutions in the near future that opens up a whole lot of new opportunities.

Big Data and Analytics for Better Data Driven Decision Making

Big Data and Analytics are the two most used buzzwords of 21st century. Data Analytics helps to understand things in detail and how something works. Use of analytics help to increase productivity, make better data driven decisions, and gain an advantage on competitors and market activities.

What is Big Data?

Big Data is the most overused and misused buzzword in the digital age. Big Data has various definitions according to the context it represent. For example, in business Big Data means Data Analytics but in technological terms it is a data set that is too big to be processed.

Big Data is a term used to represent extremely large data sets with unstructured, semi-structured and structured data that has the potential to mined for information, trends and patterns, especial relating to human behavior and interactions. 

Why is it Valuable?

Big Data is the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity. Success depends on measurement and understanding of something and it helps to improve the business and return on investment. 

Data is easily available from various touch points like Social(Facebook,twitter, Instagram..), email campaigns, websites, ticketing, merchandising, mobile app usage, etc; proper measurement and analysis helps to optimize the business performance by generating better financial results. It could be either for Saving the money by optimizing the existing process or making more money by understanding the new opportunities.

Analytics and Big Data

We will start with understanding the difference between Analytics and Big Data.

Form Wikipedia, "Analytics is the discovery, interpretation and communication of meaningful patterns in data". Analytics is built on the foundations of Statistics, Probability, Computer programs and operational research.

Analytics is the method used to find the meaningful information, trend and patterns from the large data sets and it can performed only if data is available. In simple, big data is useless if no proper analytics is performed.

Data can be captured from multiple touch points where a customer is connected with brands. It can then be analysed to make conclusions and patterns for deriving data driven decisions based on business objectives.

What are the Challenges in integrating Analytics into Business Decision Making?

The biggest challenges are setting up strategy, tools and technology and right talent to create business value.

Integration and Implementation of Analytics

Mapping out an analytics plan is difficult by creating the right strategy's based on analytics for business development and decision making. Also, the right people who understand the data and business to generate better results and value. 

What is working or not?

The other biggest challenge to find out what is working or not? Understanding the business in detail is critical for the success. 

It is important to find out what is working or not to improve the business, it depends on marketing, competition, operations, location and decisions etc. Data alone never shows what is working or not, but need analytics to find out how various categories of business can be improved.

Data Scientist is a new job role which is evolved as a result of these challenges. It combines the skill sets of business management, consultant, analyst and a programmer.

How to use Data and Analytics in Business Decision Making?

Big data calls for data driven decision making. Analytics can be used for decision making only if there is clear and present need,question,challenge.Until there is no crisp and clear statement or objective, analytics driven decision making is useless. 

Analytics is used in decision making based on the applicability of Analytics Frame work. Though data analytics used for Decision making process, the right decision has to taken and implement by business analysts or managers because data is just an element that make the BDM process more easier. 

At times, the data driven decisions can go wrong, only through the continuous analysis and understanding of the scenario bring out the better data driven results.

"Data will always helps to improve the performance but data alone never sufficient to show the best outcome in the biggest market"

Big Data and Analytics are the core part of any business decision making process as it helps to understand Needs, opportunities, performance, challenges and results. It can drive better outcomes by using the quantitative and qualitative methods. 

PS: Next blog is about how does "fan analytics" disrupt the business decision making. And, how does the implementation of Fan Analytics in the Sports and Entertainment Industry helped brands monetizing their Fans in a better way.