Given the increasingly competitive landscape for enrolling adult learners, we have been tracking the enrollment management technology landscape to better understand which partners provide impactful results. We recently spoke with Martin Lind, Education Vertical Director at Velocify, a cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) enrollment management company. Velocify offers technology to call centers that enhances campaign and inquiry management for colleges and universities competing for adult learners. Its technology platform tracks students from the time that an inquiry is received to the time that the student enrolls.
Velocify currently serves a relatively focused group of about 150 clients. Their focus is primarily for-profit colleges and universities, completion colleges, continuing education units, and online program management (OPM) providers. It allows enrollment management teams to operate more efficiently to ensure that they reach prospective students at the right time with the right messages. It also makes it easier for enrollment managers to evaluate admissions reps’ productivity.
The company’s technology platform increases the speed to lead for prospects with a few well designed processes that allow enrollment management teams to operate at scale by:
Tracking student inquiries more granularly. While every enrollment management department functions slightly differently, monitoring the funnel of prospects is crucial to understand how to increase yield. Velocify breaks down each and every prospect interaction, sometimes into more than 30 classifications, in order to better understand exactly where and why a lead may have been lost. It also integrates with Salesforce and other constituent relationship management (CRM) systems.
Automating standard processes for efficiency and compliance. Rather than taking the time to leave the same message over and over again, Velocify’s functionality allows admissions reps to leave the appropriate recording and move on to the next prospect with the click of a button. They can also receive notifications when a prospect is reading an email to catch her at just the right moment. This not only streamlines their day-to-day outreach, but also maintains compliance standards so that every college can ensure that it consistently has the appropriate disclosures in this highly regulated market.
Providing powerful data and analytics for enrollment managers to track admissions reps by campaign and activity. Knowing how to best leverage your admissions reps is integral to the success of the entire enrollment management department. While it is possible that some prospects may be lost because of marketing copy or reaching a prospect at the wrong time, in many cases, it comes down to training admissions reps. Velocify has detailed analytics for enrollment managers to compare reps by individual campaign across the enrollment funnel to understand exactly where additional training is required to make them more successful.
What is particularly remarkable about Velocify is that it serves as an enabler for online enablers. Our research on the Online Program Management (OPM) market has found that many successful OPM providers, including HotChalk, GlobalHealth Education, Greenwood Hall, Synergis Education, and others use Velocify to optimize their admissions operations. We believe that technologies like Velocify will increasingly benefit the broader higher education market as providers compete more aggressively for the next wave of adult learners, which Eduventures research has long projected will reach five million students by 2020.