Imperial College London Improves Admissions Management With Rightnow® And Expects To See A Quick Return On Investment
Goals
- Enhance prospective students’ experience with Imperial College London by offering consistent, accurate, and up-to-date information
- Reduce over-whelming prospective student calls and emails for repeat information
- Empower prospective students to gain information by serving themselves
Achievements
- 98% prospective student self-service rate
- Quantifiably improved service to prospective students: over 10,949 questions viewed in first month via RightNow and only 58 inquiries escalated by email to Imperial College London
- Improved productivity of Imperial’s admissions team advisors
Imperial College London is a world-leading, science-based university whose reputation for excellence in teaching and research attracts students and staff of the highest international quality. With its innovative research delivering practical solutions that enhance quality of life and the environment along with its renowned Tanaka Business School, the college is consistently rated in the top three of UK universities.
Due to the College’s leading reputation it receives a substantial volume of prospective student inquiries via email and telephone. A high proportion of these are repetitive inquires in relation to the admissions process and course details. Responding to these simple enquiries was impacting on the admissions team’s productivity and response times.
As a result, Imperial College London set out to find a strategic business partner to provide a leading-edge CRM solution able to support its goal in continuing to attract the most able students and staff worldwide. In particular they required a partner with expertise within education. Having heard of RightNow and visited the company’s website to view RightNow’s education customer case studies and download a white paper, Imperial requested an initial consultancy meeting. From this introduction it was clear to Imperial that RightNow was the partner of choice.
RightNow offers an online, self-learning knowledge base, enabling prospective students to have immediate answers to questions at their fingertips 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
When a prospective student enters Imperial’s website they are able to click onto the "prospective student" link. Within this area they can view over 100 commonly asked questions and their answers which are powered by RightNow. If the student is unable to find the answer to their question, RightNow provides a simple method for them to escalate their inquiry by email via the Ask a Question facility. Before this email is submitted, RightNow’s SmartAssistant® technology performs a further search of the knowledge base and is typically able to stop a further 28% of emails being submitted by offering other answers that are relevant. If this still does not answer the students question the email will be escalated to an advisor who can respond to the student directly. If deemed relevant, the advisor is able to propose the response for addition to the knowledge base to ensure this same question is not escalated again.
Due to the reduction in time spent on requests for repetitive information RightNow has resulted in a fast return on investment. The Imperial College London knowledge base has a 98% self-service rate for prospective students; reducing phone and email workloads. This has provided prospective students with immediate answers to their questions, the admissions team with more time to deal with specific queries ensuring a more time and cost effective inquiry management system.
First Steps: Imperial College London, Tanaka Business School
After a successful 30-day pilot, the RightNow-powered web based crm solution went live, and for the first twelve months was implemented within Tanaka Business School at Imperial College London. The school offers a wide variety of masters, MBAs and PHDs. Over the first twelve months visitors to the RightNow knowledge base within Tanaka Business School’s website were around 1,200 per month which resulted in a considerable reduction of calls and emails about the business school.
Roll Out: Imperial College London Registry
From RightNow’s initial success within Tanaka Business School the license was renewed for a further two years with a version upgrade with more functionality and features. The solution was then rolled out to the College’s Registry where they manage inquiries for applications for all College Faculties. The knowledge base was rapidly expanded to include questions in relation to general admissions.
“Immediately we saw 10,949 answers viewed on the webpage, with only 58 questions escalated to our Admissions Advisors via email,” said Heather Skevington, academic systems program manager, Imperial College London. “This result has meant that 98% of students visiting the Q&A page on our website are ‘serving’ themselves, ensuring that staff have time to deal with the more specific queries and our prospective students can find answers immediately.”
On Demand Delivery
Another key factor in selecting RightNow was its ability to provide an on demand delivery model which accelerates time-to-benefit. This enables customers to eliminate IT infrastructure and software ownership costs. Importantly, the hosting model absolves Imperial from the need to manage software and support infrastructure internally. As it is hosted it also has the ability to scale and grow without needing to add extra hardware.
The Future
“We are looking to expand RightNow’s usage” concluded Skevington. “We want to include RightNow customizations that will allow experts within the academic departments to answer questions raised through RightNow without needing RightNow administrative access or training. We are in the process of delivering more self-service functionality to our students and departmental staff, such as student web registration.”
Imperial College London Support Site | Imperial College London Homepage
About Imperial College, London
Imperial College was established in 1907 in London's scientific and cultural heartland in South Kensington, as a merger of the Royal College of Science, the City and Guilds College and the Royal School of Mines.
Greg Gianforte