How to quickly set up and manage an XCM platform

Covid reshaped higher education for good. Because of the lightning shift to online environments, it's never been clearer that a digital-first approach is necessary for the future of student marketing, admissions, and recruitment.

In fact, one of the best strategies for responding to Covid challenges is to redefine your student recruitment approach, according to Deloitte.

As part of this strategy, your institution should consider:

• Opening up new lines of communication and engagement with prospective students.
• Investing in personalized digital collateral to help find, attract and convert your best-fit student prospects.

Fortunately, with an Experience Communication Management (XCM) platform, you can do all of that and more.

Introducing Experience Communication Management

An Experience Communication Management platform allows you to show prospects what your institution is really like. You can connect prospects and ambassadors through multimedia content, peer-to-peer conversations and group chats.

Better still, with the right XCM platform, you can dramatically improve your institution's entire recruitment and marketing efforts.

In fact, after using our XCM platform, The University of Adelaide achieved a 400 percent increase in conversion to acceptance rates.

So, how can you get started with an XCM platform today?

How to quickly set up and manage an XCM platform

You might think a platform that delivers such results would be overly technical to use. This isn't the case.

TAP's XCM platform is specifically designed with efficiency in mind. Not only that, it doesn't take long to set up either. You can do it in five simple steps.

Here are a few top tips on how to set up and manage our XCM platform.

1. Set out strategic goals

Before you go live, think about what you want to achieve with an XCM platform. What are your institution's strategic goals? And how can you clearly articulate them to your team?

We suggest reviewing your student recruitment funnel to identify what you need to improve. For example, maybe you're not effectively targeting your best-fit students, or feel your application to acceptance rate could be better.

Whatever you find, acknowledge the problem and plan an effective strategy to improve.

At TAP, we help our customers set out their vision during our Setup Call. This is where a Sales Manager and Customer Success Manager collaboratively help you determine your strategic goals and then tailor your use of our platform to achieve them.

2. Identify your student ambassadors in advance

Even if you don't have an ambassador program, you're bound to have students who want to help. You just need to find them.

Think about the most engaged students on your campus. The ones who sign up for student families, societies and volunteer as guides on open days. They are your future ambassadors.

You may be worried about forking out money to pay your ambassadors. But, incentivizing student ambassadors needn't be expensive.

In fact, in our experience, alternative remunerations and other incentives work well. Some examples of this are:

• Ambassador of the month competitions.
• Commission on prospects who enroll to study after talking to an ambassador.
• Regularly sharing positive results highlighting the difference your ambassadors are making.

By identifying engaged students and incentivizing them, you'll have your ambassador dream team. Not only that, if you select your ambassadors in advance, we could get you up and running on our XCM platform within a week.

3. Provide fast, effective training

To make the most of any XCM platform, you need proper training. That said, not many institutions have the capacity to do this.

That's where we come in.

Once signed up, all TAP customers receive two complimentary consultancy workshops. Each workshop only lasts an hour, so you get fast, effective XCM platform training at no extra cost. They are:

• TAP demo and training. We train admin users (staff) on how The Ambassador Platform works and how to use each feature.
• XCM strategy workshop. We review each stage of the recruitment funnel and showcase how to effectively use our platform at each point. We'll also cover how to create amazing content with your ambassadors, then use it to drive conversions.

Not only that, but we also help you train your ambassadors with bespoke training sessions which provide a safe environment for practice and learning. These sessions include a practical element where your ambassadors can have mock conversations with members of the TAP team posing as prospective students. They also get to create content and answer FAQs.

In addition to this, we provide monthly training webinars. These webinars cover the same theoretical learning points but don't have a practical element. We run these to provide any ambassadors who missed the main session still receive an overview of the platform and how to use it.

You can also tailor ambassador training in our Ambassador Training Center. This allows you to send pre-recorded relevant videos to new ambassadors, ensuring they understand TAP and its features.

A better recruitment funnel is as easy as XCM

Due to its ease of use, quick set-up, and proven results, there's no reason your institution shouldn't benefit from an Experience Communication Management platform.

With the right platform, you can exceed your student recruitment targets by making the recruitment process more accessible, personalized, empowering, and informative.

If you'd like to experience the power of The Ambassador Platform yourself, book a demo today.