Impact of AI and Technology in Admissions, Sales, and Marketing

“No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data.”

―John Sculley, Ex-Apple CEO

In terms of expansion and finding new grounds, 2019 has been the most successful year for AI development, where it has seen the growth of 53% in global data analysis. Where it has been recorded that AI is working in full swing in decision making or is in the development process to be implemented by the first quarter of 2020. 

• By the end of 2020, we can see more than 25% of Fortune 500 companies working towards making intelligent process automation an integral part of their company (IPA). This means automating a particular task in a company using AI. 
• The main aim is to make a machine that can successfully guise as a human and interact with customers and provide a solution to their problems, and these machines are called conversational agents. 
• These AI programs will save a ton of time and human resources, which is needed to entertain a customer problem via phone call or a mail chat. 
• On the other hand, HR and IT teams can use conversational agents as monitoring tools by using big data processing. 

With an increase in data, it is hard to detect an error that’s causing the aggregate data to make no sense when using AI to sort the data. It will take less time to find the anomaly and testifying its behavior. Thus, a human operator will have much more time and information on how to solve the error and make it correct in a short time. 

As things stand, the whole world is going through Pandemic, which certainly increases the risk of raising interest that could lead to a dampening of consumption and investment in AI technology. Still, it could reduce the market value of a company that has been using AI. A reduction in market value is not a new thing when it comes to universities and educational institutes. Even the biggest names in this field are dependent on the valuations that provide insights such as an increase in long-term profits.

AI being the backbone of the enrollment process

AI is helping teachers in making decisions, which leads to an increase in engagement with students, thus assisting the students during the orientation process. The sole reason AI is being used in the education industry is that it can automate and augment much of the admission process, allowing teams to distance themselves from other tasks and focus on handling face-to-face meetings. Given below are some points which highlight how AI makes the most of your student’s data and converts it into a successful admission.

Taking assistance from the data to decide enrollment actions

Some of your most challenging problems have their solutions hiding in reinforcement learning. It’s a subpart of machine learning. With the help of this, technology models are trained to take necessary actions to maximize the reward as much as possible. For example, AI helps to automatically shortlist candidates for quality admissions, as it makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs, and perform human-like tasks. 

Pipelining is a method in which one finds out new leads from the database of students and parents, which the institute has already acquired. You can use a bot to make things easier for you, and he will create a lead database for you, from which you can send personalized emails to potential students. In addition to this, you can use AI to create a chatbot that can help you nurture your prospects. It can even go through your CRM on its own to analyze the newsletters, videos, etc. This innovative feature can result in the auto-trigger of hot leads for further follow-ups on a face to face meetings or a call. 

The final step is to make a student join your university. It would be best if you relied on how good your sales team is. You can use AI to shorten the process by enabling bots that can find phone numbers of students for you on their own; this will help improve your productivity while streamlining the whole orientation process. As a result, a college will have a better chance to have students that scored appropriate marks in a shorter span, allowing them to start with teaching much faster in comparison to traditional colleges. 

Boost Engagement of your courses using drip campaigns 

Making the right decisions in marketing and advertising using the given data is one thing, but it all comes down to successful email marketing for education, that’s where drip campaigns are important. Drip campaigns are a way to automate the emailing processing using AI, sending the mail to the contact when he sets off the trigger like pressing the button on your website or filling up a form. Also, a trigger could be a student who has achieved a much higher score than the average score. 

• Using drip campaigns, automated emails give you the freedom to connect to your contacts in a more approachable manner once these campaigns are set up. 
• They will run on their own just like an autopilot. 
• On the other hand, the chances of a parent opening up your drip campaign email are 80% more than a single send, which is also known as email blasts. 
• With this, your average click-through rate will see a bump of three times that of a regular email. 

Moreover, with AI, you can build the relationships that are important for your institutes to be successful in the educational industry. By finding out students with potential and giving them insight on how your educational institute helps them in shaping their career, you can build the trust factor through a series of Emails. You can increase your chances of getting a visit from the parents once the results are declared, and students can choose a college for themselves. Some of the successful examples of drip campaigns are Amazon, Flipkart, and Nike. With the drip campaigns, they notify a potential customer about the new product launch, which might interest the customer, making them buy the product from their E-commerce website. 

Many times, it could happen that a student is not ready to get admission. He wants to know more about your college and your teaching methods before signing up for a course. With a drip campaign, you will nurture the student and help him make the right decision. It will help you communicate your courses and benefits in a much more engaging way, providing an answer to possible questions and clarifying any objection a prospect is having with your courses. In short, a drip campaign will indulge a student or a parent and give you time to understand them and their needs.

Predictive analytics will help you understand the thinking of students

Predictive analytics helps colleges capture relationships between many factors to measure the probability of a risk on a given set of conditions. The AI system uses different data mining patterns along with predictive modelling to bring together the information that is needed to decide on the counselling of a student. With the successful implication of predictive analytics, a college can take full advantage of its big data warehouse.

In addition to this- 

• It allows organizations to be more active in terms of forward-looking and anticipating outcomes based on behavioural data. 
• It also leads to perspective analytics that goes further deep in suggesting actions from the predictions.  
• This feature gives multiple options to risk management in deciding their final action.

When using it for admission and counselling, an institute could analyze the spending, and the requirement of a student, leading to more efficient counselling, inevitably increasing the chances of the student finding the right college for himself.

Moreover, it can help in pointing out inaccurate fee transactions by marking them with red flags for the management. It can keep track of all your online and offline fee transaction feuds and notify you about thefts and false student loan claims. To find the best portfolio to maximize your return in a capital asset pricing model while providing you probabilistic risk assessment for you to yield accurate forecasts, you can always look for predictive analytics to assist you. 

Some of the most significant use cases of predictive analytics in colleges and institutes are helping them find the latest trends in the educational industry. In addition to this, this will help colleges in identifying struggling students and streamline the advising process.

Social media sentiment analysis to find out brand’s perception

You should never think of your customers as just data points; we know it is easy to overlook your customer’s feelings and emotions, as these are quite difficult to measure. 

But emotions and what the individual thinks about you as a brand is the number one factor in deciding the purchase. Now everyone has got the internet, and thus, everyone is on social media trying to keep up with the trend of posting content daily, it’s an excellent platform for brands and colleges to see what people think about and how their courses make people feel. 

In sentiment analysis, an organization tries to get information such as the perception of their brand in the minds of consumers. In addition to this, sentiment analysis can be marked as a subset of social listening. 

There are questions that you need to ask, such as: Are your courses and lectures helping students clear their doubts? Are students happy with the current curriculum, or are they any new subject or a concept which they want to learn from the college? These are the small things which can help you understand your students better

An organization no matter how big or a small it needs to look for their social mentions on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and educational institutes, you need to scroll through LinkedIn

CRM (Customer relationship management)

With AI, CRMs can now transcribe and analyze the phone calls done by your sales team and give them feedback. It can record phone meetings while capturing time-stamped notes, highlighting the references for the topic. 

Furthermore- 

• AI can perform in-call analysis, such as the speaking patterns of a customer, word choice, and other conversational dynamics. 
• To find out the emotional state of the customer and guide in real-time to convert the prospect into a close sales.

Another problem colleges face is an uneven distribution of student data among the callers, leading some of them to be free while others to be too busy to concentrate on one call. 

AI coupled with a CRM that works for you can- 

• saves the time of parents and eases the pressure off your admission team.
• provides you ample time to explain all the different courses and successfully fix up the date for the counseling.
• helps in targeted marketing such as drip campaigns.

In conclusion

There are so many other ways in which AI is changing the educational industry landscape, and we will see more changes in this field as AI becomes more advanced and human-like. To conclude, we can say that in 2020, AI, along with adaptive machine learning, are the building blocks of a vast frontier for the universities of the coming years.