Case study · Education

IIE Rosebank College communicates more effectively with 200,000+ prospective students

Infobip, in partnership with Floodgate, deployed its full suite of omnichannel solutions to help IIE Rosebank College manage large volumes of leads and communicate with around 200,000 prospective students per year.

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Client background

IIE Rosebank College is a private tertiary education institution that delivers affordable, quality tertiary education that leads to employment. The college generates interest among prospective students in several ways. The main one is school presentations, which build relationships with secondary schools and promote its courses to grade 12 learners. Learners who are interested in further study complete a lead card. Student advisors then call them to talk about their career interests and help them enrol.

The institution's website is also a key lead generator. On it, prospective students can browse, enquire, apply, register, live chat, WhatsApp and request a call back.

The challenge

IIE Rosebank College communicates with about 200,000 prospective students every year, so it needed to process a high volume of leads at a low cost. Before 2016, leads were collected on paper lead cards at school presentations and then captured into the CRM by hand before the sales process could begin.

Lead cards would remain uncaptured for weeks, and manual capturing introduced errors. Time and quality were the two big problems, and both hurt conversation and conversion rates.

The college needed a technology its audience could actually use. In 2016, smartphone penetration in South Africa was around 36%, while 94% of adult South Africans used a cellphone of some kind. The solution had to work on both smartphones and feature phones, which led the college to Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD). It ran a cost-benefit analysis to weigh the costs and the revenue that improving the process could bring.

The solution

  1. 2016: USSD lead captureEngaged on industry recommendation, Floodgate digitised manual lead capture with USSD. Leads were now delivered to the CRM in real time.
  2. September 2020: Infobip partnershipChannels such as Facebook Messenger, live chat and WhatsApp were being used in isolation, which made chats hard to manage and measure. Floodgate introduced the college to Infobip.
  3. Phase 1: Cloud contact centreInfobip Conversations was deployed so that agents could work remotely from any device during the COVID-19 lockdown. The college's existing WhatsApp platform was integrated into it.
  4. Phase 2: Chatbots and more channelsOver three months the scope grew to the full product suite: Answers chatbots, plus Facebook Messenger and live chat.

Today, the college's call-centre agents use the Floodgate and Infobip Conversations module to manage WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and live chat conversations with prospective students. Infobip Answers runs the Messenger and live chat bot. Floodgate deployed a webhook in Conversations to run the college's third-party chatbot on WhatsApp. Infobip People stores the contact information of every lead received. The college is preparing to use Moments for promotional messages and broadcasts, and is considering Surveys as a future addition.

The result

All channels were combined into one platform. The queuing system made chats easier to manage and gave the college better visibility of agent performance. It also shows which prospective students are still waiting for a response, which helps the college manage expectations.

The chatbot helps the college cope with high volumes during peak enrolment, and every prospect can get basic information from it straight away. IIE Rosebank College now manages high volumes of leads, converts them effectively into sales, and has reporting Floodgate built to measure performance accurately.