When a student is joining a new school or college, they have lots of questions from term dates to timetables, bus routes to financial support and uniform to application forms.
The way you handle these FAQs will make a big difference to your prospect's journey to enrolment. Your processes for receiving and responding to these questions will also impact on your admissions team and their workload.
Here are some simple improvements we recommend for handling FAQs for your school or college:
Convenience for your customers is key. Adding a live chat function to your website will make it much easier for your prospective students to ask you their questions when they may not want to pick up the phone. Live chat tools are readily available and simple to set up - tools such as HubSpot offer live chat in their free products.
Remember to allocate 'away' time for your admissions team, you may want to cover your live chat on a rota.
It may sound obvious, but if you are busy answering questions as they come in, you may not be recording which ones are 'frequently asked'. By noting the questions that are asked, you know which ones you need to add to your website as FAQs. Also, try answering these questions in content for your website, a blog article about your bus routes for example.
Providing website content directly linked to the questions that your prospects are asking will improve your customer experience and have a positive impact on your SEO too.
If you have dozens of questions that are frequently asked, then we recommend looking into a Knowledge Base platform to allow your prospects to search for the answer to their question.
If you have just a handful of FAQs then a clear web page with questions and answers listed may be enough.
Any FAQs page or Knowledge Base on your website must be updated frequently with the most up to date information. This may be a termly task for your admissions team to review the entries and tweak as needed - making sure the information remains relevant for visitors.
By recording your FAQs, you will start to predict the types of things that your prospects will ask at different points in the journey. Use this insight to send automated emails or blog posts to your contacts just when they need their questions answering.
This level of customer experience will show your prospects how much you care and remove any barriers to them continuing their admissions journey with you. It also has the added benefit of reducing the number of times a prospect has to pick up the phone or email your admissions team - saving everyone time.
Once your FAQs are on your website or Knowledge Base, and are answering your prospect's questions, you will be able to gather data on how they are performing.
This may be as simple as reporting on page views and time spent on pages in Google Analytics, or if you are using a Knowledge Base your reporting may be more granular showing search queries and the specific articles they returned for your website visitors.
Ongoing monitoring and reporting on your FAQs will allow you to measure they impact they are having. Once established, consider automated follow up emails or a well-timed pop up: "Did you find the answer to your question?", gather feedback at every opportunity and use it to continually improve and provide value to your prospects.