Higher Education Call Centres: Scripts vs Frameworks

If call centre marketing is a service that you’re still on the fence about and not yet convinced it’s worth your time, we’re here to tell you that leveraging phone sales is a valuable exercise for higher education providers.

Using a call centre allows you to learn more about your prospective students with a human-centred approach and gain more quantifiable insights that you can use for market research.

As a first response tool, call centre marketing helps your Future Students team to maximise enrolments by personalising the student experience, and building brand credibility and trust with an optimal first impression.

Benefits of call centre marketing for higher ed

1. Filter those who aren’t serious about studying faster instead of going back and forth via email in an interaction that feels more transactional
2. Stop wasting resources sending emails to students who may not be ready to enquire
3. Build rapport and better gauge how a prospective student is feeling
4. Increase your touchpoints earlier in the customer journey
5. Pivot your approach to nurture those who are on the fence or speaking with competitors
6. Have a transparent process over attempts to call back and increase contactability with a structured calling method

Future Students team

A structured call centre process provides your Future Students team with a consistent pipeline of qualified leads, freeing them up to focus on prospects with a higher propensity to enrol.

Marketing team

For marketers, the insights collected through a call centre can empower them to make informed data-driven decisions around messaging and audiences. This in turn creates an agile and insights-driven environment to test marketing effectiveness.

Prospective students

Contacting prospective students quickly and focusing on their needs will help them take the next step and create a seamless experience based on the platform and device they are using.

“You can send 1,000 emails and get no response so you assume 1,000 people aren’t interested in studying.”
— Adam Hardy

Our top tips to convert students on the phone

• Establish the emotional and logical motivations of the prospective student and match the course benefits and features to these drivers.
• Find out how much research prospective students have done before this point to understand where they are in the student journey. Have they looked at other campuses or higher education providers?
• Work out your KSPs from the get-go and use these to stand out
• It’s important your call centre agents know the benefits of the course without needing to read off a script.

“It’s easier to say no through an email than speaking to someone. The issue here is that you don’t know why. With a call centre we capture plenty of data that tells us where we can improve and more importantly answer the big question… If not, WHY?”
— Max Schuler

Call scripts vs. framework

I’m sure we’ve all sat through a tedious call that felt staged and like someone was reading off a piece of paper and not genuinely caring about you and what you want to achieve.

For this reason, we recommend using a framework instead of a script. This offers room for the conversation to grow and the personality of the call centre agent to shine through.

Why you should use a call framework

1. Frameworks create the structure needed to guide a conversation while allowing for creative freedom
2. Provide a checklist with your framework to achieve the desired result while adding your own personal touch
3. Frameworks enable you to build rapport with prospective students
4. Through a framework you can better identify areas for coaching and tailor the approach to the individual, improving the skills of your call centre agents

While call scripts aren’t entirely redundant, it’s important to know that scripts are becoming outdated and mostly used to populate a well-structured framework. Reading off a script, you will lose the authenticity of speaking with a real person, and the advantage of using a call centre.

Our Melbourne-based call centre

Our Melbourne-based call centre will support your Future Students team and improve the student experience. Here are the top 6 benefits our higher education clients love about using our call centre:

1. Instant response on leads means we call leads within 2 hours of being generated
2. Our agents are trained to profile prospects and filter out tyre-kickers
3. We use SMS notifications to ensure the handover process is seamless for both the agent and the student
4. We’re accountable for results and provide live reports to track performance
5. Fixed cost per managed lead for select industries based on the number of enquiries you generate on a monthly basis
6. LeadConvert is an extension of your team with an intensive onboarding program that enables us to nail your brand’s TOV, course offering and enrolment process