Increasing student enrollment is one of the biggest challenges schools face. But whether you recruit directly, rely on recruitment agents, or both, specific digital tools can be your best friend.
HEM’s student portal is one tool that increases applications and registrations by up to 30%. Why? Because it lets schools and agents offer the simple and smooth self-serve experience today’s students want online when deciding to move forward with an application or booking.
Read on to discover how a strong student portal system design can enhance student recruitment efforts!
Why Consider Education Agents and Agent Management Systems for Your School?
Education agents – also known as student advisors, education consultants, or student representatives – can be valuable assets for schools looking to boost enrollment numbers. They can be individuals or organizations working to provide schools with promotion and recruitment services. These agents are generally experts in the education sector, and their involvement can help prospects better evaluate their options or complete a school’s application process.
When relying on education agents, you want to make sure your school is equipped to provide them with the support they need while maximizing their impact on your recruitment efforts. This is why a well-designed agent management system is key.
By using one, you can increase your chances of boosting enrollments through your agent channel, especially since a dedicated platform can make it easier for your agents to access important information and complete certain tasks. It can also increase time efficiency and productivity within your school, allowing your in-house admissions and recruitment team to focus on more complex tasks that can’t simply be handled by software.
1. Manage Your School’s Education Agents with an Efficient Student Portal Design System
If you’re working with education agents, then you likely already know the importance of managing a well-organized list of your contacts. You’ll want to be able to quickly find their names, contact details, and represented students, to name a few key details. Without a system in place to sort this information, it can be difficult to find what you need when you need it.
HEM’s proprietary Student Portal (SP) allows schools to centralize their recruitment efforts by enabling them to set up accounts for both individual agents and agencies. You can import agencies from your school’s CRM, provide agents with limited backend access to the portal, and add or manage these users with ease. By navigating to the Recruiters Hub section page on the platform, you’ll be able to view all the agency profiles you’ve created on your portal, as shown below:
The student portal system design is set up so you can quickly add a new agency, inputting the relevant name, location, and contact details. Once you click on the name of a particular agency, you’ll be directed to that agency’s specific page, giving you access to the information you need:
Creating these accounts for your education agents can help your team avoid wasting precious time looking for important information. This way, you can boost your productivity and improve how you manage your numerous recruitment efforts.
2. Easily Check in on Your Education Agents’ Applications and Monitor Progress
An important benefit of using a student portal with an agent gateway is the ability to check in and follow up on your agents’ progress. Platforms that offer tracking and monitoring features are especially valuable for schools looking to improve their recruitment efforts. That’s because these features can give schools unique insight into their performance and how well they’re meeting their recruitment objectives.
Using HEM’s SP, schools can easily track applications by navigating to the Applications Dashboard shown below:
Schools that have set up an agent account can also benefit from this monitoring feature. Here, you can simply navigate to the Recruiters Hub and view the applications that are being handled by different agents. Each application will include a progress bar that indicates how far along agents are from completing their application:
Designed to serve the education sector, HEM’s proprietary Student Portal is tailored perfectly to meet the needs of educational institutions of all kinds, including universities and colleges, as well as K-12 and language schools. With this software, your school improves its collaboration with agents and works together to increase enrollments. Interested in giving it a try? Request a free demo of our education-focused student portal.
3. Streamline Recruitment by Providing Agents with Access to Key Information
It’s important for agents to be up to date on your school’s information, so providing them with the details they need can streamline the recruitment process. The portal should be easy for agents to use, helping them work more efficiently with your school, thus keeping it top of mind.
With HEM-SP, agents can access multiple schools and campuses in the system. In fact, you can customize their user roles to grant or deny them access to specific actions within the portal. For instance, if you want to give your agents additional information about your school and its programs or campus on the portal, you can provide them with regular user access in addition to their agent login. This can give them wider access, going beyond just their own application submission.
Providing information about your school is a key tip to try with education agents as well as your prospects. Here, it’s worth mentioning that the HEM-SP also features a Virtual Admissions Assistant (VAA), which allows prospects to explore different aspects of what a school has to offer. Here’s a snapshot of how it might look for prospects using HEM-SP:
The HEM VAA is designed to help prospects plan out their studies and can give your school an opportunity to integrate enticing copy and visuals about your campus, programs, and financing options. This can give your school a more academic approach to student login. With the help of the VAA, you can significantly facilitate online student recruitment and optimize your efforts.
4. Use Your Student Portal System Design to Help Agents Manage Student Enrollments and Applications
Your school likely already established a system for managing and processing applications that come directly from students, but what if those applications came from their representative instead? A useful student portal can give your school the flexibility to accept, process, and manage these incoming applications, ultimately making them more accessible for prospective students.
In this situation, your student portal system design should make it easy for agents to start applications, upload necessary documents, and submit once they’re ready. Not only would it need to support a streamlined user experience and a positive booking experience, but it would also give your agents more control and options to work with.
Using HEM-SP, agents can submit and manage applications for multiple students. They have the option to initiate an application and send the student access to that application as well as invite other agents to join the agency on the portal platform. The pop-up window below shows just how easy it is to fill in a new user’s details on HEM-SP, which would trigger an email inviting a new user to activate their account:
By allowing agents to handle applications directly, you have the potential to increase enrollment numbers. You can even use this feature to improve cooperation between your school’s admissions team and agents regarding advancing prospects throughout the enrollment journey. Because the portal enables tracking, you can rest easy knowing you can check in on the progress of individual applications handled by different agents as they are updated.
5. Provide Your School’s Education Agents with Secure Access and Quick Support
Digitizing the admissions process may seem intimidating for some schools, but the key lies in providing a secure platform with quick support. This applies when dealing with both prospects and agents through a student portal system design. Your school’s portal should provide its users with secure login, making it accessible only to those with authorized access. This way, you can protect sensitive information about your prospects and their studies and provide agents with a way to view this information and make changes securely.
By creating an account in HEM-SP, you’ll be able to safely log into your dashboard and view key reports to stay up to date with your school’s recruitment efforts, such as the number of applicants, the number of agents, and the percentage of submitted applications. The dashboard will look similar to this:
Just as your school has its own login credentials, agents can have their own separate portal access, where they can sign up or log in if they have an existing account.
Every feature on HEM-SP undergoes a thorough verification process involving quality assurance and heavy testing before its launch. This way, users can enjoy a smooth and positive experience that meets schools’ needs and expectations.
Because providing support is important when working with agents towards better recruitment, you’ll want to have a system in place that can help them whenever a need arises. To accommodate this, HEM-SP accepts support requests that are handled via a helpdesk system, which promptly addresses each case and provides any necessary technical support. Systems like these can make your student portal and agent management system appear more reliable to its users, making it easier to collaborate with external agents.
6. Consider Combining HEM-SP with Mautic CRM for a Seamless Admissions Experience
When looking to improve your student recruitment strategy, one of the most important things to consider is how you can maximize the results of what you are already working with. Essentially, you want to be working with the right tools and using them in the most efficient manner, giving you the highest return on investment. This means integrating different recruitment tools together, like integrating your student portal with a powerful CRM. Taking this step allows your school to easily manage leads as well as submissions simultaneously.
You can use your HEM’s Mautic CRM to identify and nurture high-quality leads, easily following up with them to push them further along the enrollment funnel. With the help of HEM’s VAA, you can help prospects plan their studies and provide valuable information that can make them more invested in your school and their enrollment journey.
Once prospects are ready to start their application, they can launch HEM-SP and begin filling out the customized application form you’ve created for your school, which they can review and edit before submitting. If they’re not ready to submit, they can have a summary of their program emailed to them via Mautic since they’re already a registered contact. This entire process supports a seamless booking experience that can delight prospects, making it a notable option for schools wondering how to improve student engagement in the application process.
To get started with this on HEM-SP, you’ll need to navigate to “School Settings” in your menu and click on “Integrations.” From there, you’ll be able to enable your CRM account and add all the necessary details in the appropriate fields:
This integration feature lets your school connect your Mautic agencies with your HEM-SP account. Simply navigate to the Recruiters Hub and choose to load agencies by completing the fields with the drop-down menus:
A student portal system design that provides you with this level of flexibility and control can serve to strengthen your team’s recruitment efforts and improve your collaboration with education agents, fueling better results.
