In today’s increasingly competitive Higher Education landscape, institutions are facing a myriad of challenges including disengaged students, higher dropout rates, and lower success rates - not to mention the speed at which incoming or transferring students are expecting admissions and financial aid award decisions, which is increasing all the while.
Fortunately, emerging technology solutions allow colleges and universities to make informed decisions fast while maintaining a personal touch for each student, which helps boost engagement throughout a student’s time at your institution.
These days, students expect their interactions with your institution to be on par with their favorite online tools – instant answers via Google, quick entertainment via Instagram and Tik Tok, and wide availability for e-commerce. It’s vital for Higher Ed institutions to modernize their approach to student engagement in our “want it now” economy, and modernizing your registrar, financial aid, and student affairs departments will help ensure the best possible outcomes for your students and staff.
With the right technology solution, institutions can digitize and centralize important student data, automate mundane and manual business processes (like transcript processing), and leverage intelligent automation to gain key insights into the student lifecycle. These solutions present new opportunities to redefine the campus experience and deliver on the demands of tech-savvy students for efficient, quick, and convenient processes and systems.
Intelligent Automation for Efficiency and Accuracy
Information usually enters institutions in large volumes and in various formats, which is complicated for administration staff to handle – often requiring manual, hand-keying of data into various Student Information Systems (SIS) or Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. Manually manipulating data can be error prone, and switching between siloed systems causes process bottlenecks that introduce delays into your institution workflows, leading to poor student experiences. These time-consuming tasks monopolize your staff’s time, which should be used to better serve students and help lead the futures you’re trying to create.
A recent AIIM report on how intelligent automation can impact an organization found that siloed content across different repositories and applications is still the largest content-related business challenge for 66% of respondents!
Consider processing all those transcripts that come into your organization twice per year – high school, transfer credit, international, and military – which traditionally are processed manually, requiring 15 or 20 minutes per transcript in most cases. An admissions process augmented with intelligent automation will classify these transcripts, extract meaningful data from them, and make that data available to your SIS, ECM, and admissions staff – without the need for human intervention in most instances. When students are expecting quick and accurate answers, intelligent automation is the key to unlocking your institution’s admissions potential.
Data Driven Insights for Better Student Retention
In addition to intelligent document capture, workflow automation technology will expedite processes that staff are used to performing manually, and move students through their workflow faster. These solutions can notify staff when actions are needed to proceed forward, and provide visibility into where a student’s application is in real time. This further frees up your staff to focus on higher-value work, enabling them to personalize interactions with students and improve engagement levels.
Emerging technology solutions enable you to design better experiences for your students. Institutions can harness the vast data potential they already have, and can use analytics and process automation tools to track student progress, predict employability rates, and gain key insights to support student success and retention efforts.
Your faculty and staff can spend more time helping students understand their options on education programs and better career directions. This ultimately allows students to feel confident about their admissions standing and career decisions, because they have the opportunity to connect with staff that can provide quality interactions throughout their time at your institution.
Guarantee the Best Outcomes for your Students and Staff
With the right solution, Higher Education institutions can rise to the challenge of digital disruptions by focusing on deepening student engagement. An intelligently designed process supported with automation will refine and tailor your student’s experience, providing the personal touch they desire. And as a result, institutions can nurture student relationships to make a more significant impact on student enrollment and success rates.
At Shamrock, we help to eliminate the negative impact of disjointed processes and applications for your campus.
With years of implementation experience in higher education, we can revolutionize your transcript processing, create a level of student communication management, secure file sharing, electronic form creation and custom workflow development that seamlessly connects with your existing systems and applications.
Talk to us today about how we can help boost productivity and reduce stress during your busiest time of year, and guarantee the best outcomes for your students, faculty, and staff!