Minnesota Online Deploys RightNow® To Optimize Student Experience From First Inquiry Through Course Completion
Goals
- Deliver a competitively differentiated student experience
- Maximize prospect conversion and student retention rates
- Optimize advisor productivity
Achievements
- Attentive care across the entire student lifecycle
- Full visibility into student status and issues
- Advisors able to support nearly 600 students at a time
The online education market is booming. Analysts estimate that it will grow to $52.6 billion by 2010. So it’s essential for online providers to make the most of every lead and to differentiate themselves from the growing competition.
Minnesota Online has made RightNow a key component of its strategy for both growth and differentiation. By implementing the full suite of RightNow’s next generation CRM solutions, Minnesota Online is able to deliver a competitively differentiated experience across the entire prospect lifecycle. Minnesota Online can track their progress and issues at every stage of this lifecycle in order to quickly and effectively respond to their changing needs. And because RightNow enables student advisors to be so productive, Minnesota Online can support its growing customer base with remarkable efficiency.
The result is that Minnesota Online is well-positioned to maintain its leadership in the online education market—and to do so quite profitably.
“RightNow has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful environment for attentively maintaining quality relationships with large numbers of prospects and matriculants over the internet,” says Linda Thompson, who manages technology and services for the Minnesota Online support center. “It provides us with a single, highly adaptable solution that we can use to better serve students, gain visibility into market trends, and keep costs under control.”
Caring For Students From Their First Site Visit
Minnesota Online invests in a variety of promotional efforts, such as Google AdWords, to drive prospective students to its website. It’s therefore critical for Minnesota Online to make the most of every lead generated by these promotions.
So, when prospects visit the Minnesota Online site—which more than 900 new inquiries were recently generated in a short period—they are invited to fill out a webform with information about who they are and what they are looking for. This information is automatically entered into Minnesota Online’s RightNow contact database. The resulting record is used to support delivery of a great customer experience from that moment on.
One way Minnesota Online uses the database for specific institutional contracts is to track the status of contacts as they go from merely expressing interest to actually applying to a Minnesota State College or University and registering for a specific program. This process can be somewhat complex, since students need to submit the necessary transcripts and test results. By creating customized fields in RightNow, Minnesota Online makes it easy for its advisors to keep an eye on this process and send alerts to students via RightNow’s automated customer services when they need to get something done.
Using RightNow’s flexible business rules, Minnesota Online can also automatically send out a wide range of notices and reminders based on any definable set of conditions—such as when a deadline is approaching, a new course offering becomes available in the student’s area of interest, or a certain amount of time elapses since the last contact with a prospect.
This proactive, streamlined management of the student lifecycle accomplishes several things:
- It provides students with personalized service that makes it clear that Minnesota Online is attentive to their needs.
- It optimizes conversion rates by making sure that no prospective students “fall through the cracks.”
- It enables Minnesota Online’s advisor staff to be extremely productive.
- In fact, in a small pilot using RightNow to manage their relationships with students, Minnesota Online advisors have successfully worked with as many as 580 active and prospective students at a time. Advisors can maintain personal “to do” lists with time-critical tasks prioritized appropriately. Whenever they speak to a student on the phone or reply to an email, they have ready access to all relevant information about that student. And they can quickly intervene if an unresolved problem or looming deadline threatens to derail someone’s education plans.
Having all the information about every student in an easily accessible record also enables other advisors to quickly help out when a student’s primary advisor isn’t around. This makes it possible for Minnesota Online to offer great live service on the student’s timetable – which is another significant competitive advantage in the 24-hour-a-day world of internet-based education.
“With RightNow, we always know what’s going on with our students and we’re always prepared to deal with it,” says Thompson. “These are indispensable capabilities when you’re trying to build bonded relationships over the internet.”
Type-And-Click Access To A Broad Range Of Relevant Knowledge
In addition to keeping track of students, Minnesota Online also has to manage information about a diverse range of educational programs—and make that information readily available to whoever needs it, whenever they need it. This is a significant challenge when you consider that the programs Minnesota Online offers are actually run by 32 independent institutions located across the state.
RightNow enables Minnesota Online to meet this challenge by providing it with highly practical and sophisticated knowledge management technology. Information about courses and programs from all participating institutions is incorporated into Minnesota Online’s knowledge foundation, where it can be easily updated and modified as required. More importantly, it can be readily accessed by both advisors and students via a variety of intuitive and accurate methods—including topical browsing, keyword search, and a “Top 20” list of the most currently popular subjects.
The knowledge foundation is particularly valuable as a self service customer care resource on the Minnesota Online website. It provides students with immediate answers 24 hours a day while at the same time freeing advisors from having to answer a tremendous volume of routine questions by phone or email. Advisors can also use it to make sure they present students with all appropriate options so that they can ultimately connect them with the program that best meets their needs in terms of content, cost, and time.
Thompson also says that RightNow has been an excellent business partner over the course of Minnesota Online’s student experience initiative. “RightNow isn’t one of those vendors that leaves you pretty much on your own once you buy the software. They remain closely engaged with us and consistently demonstrate real concern for ensuring that we fulfill our business goals as quickly and resource-efficiently as possible.”
MnSCU-MN Online Support Site | MnSCU-MN Online Homepage
About MNSCU-MN Online
Minnesota Online is one of the nation’s leading providers of higher education on the internet. In association with 32 member institutions of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, Minnesota Online offers thousands of online credit and non-credit courses and over 200 online degree, certificate, and diploma programs.
Greg Gianforte