Stefan 
Any of these sound familiar?
- It feels like you’re always millimetres away from missing a student visa deadline
- Responding to student emails and remembering to follow up with students sometimes slips through the cracks
- Student info is just in too many places – Excel? Google Sheets? Actual PAPER?! – and it takes forever to find what you need
- You just can’t afford hiring a virtual assistant to keep you on top of things
- You just can’t keep track of every communication channel you use (Emails, phone calls and in-person meetings)
What do you think all the above have in common? I’ll help you out. They all come down to one thing – being organised.
These issues are not affecting only education and migration agencies. According to IDC, a research firm in the field, poor efficiency costs companies anywhere between 20% to 30% of their annual revenue. Most of these inefficiencies are related to client information.
Manually tracking student information is no easy fit, but once you address these challenges, you’ll be able to:
- avoid getting in touch with the student too often (and sounding unprofessional)
- reduce the margin for error by bringing student information all in one place
- understand the student you like working with and the ones you don’t (those you should avoid working with)
- keep your head above water
This article will address how to address the most common challenges that stop you from keeping track of your student’s information.
Start using Inteleagent for free today.
Get the best application management platform – totally free (no credit card, no obligation. Instant set-up).
1.How to keep track of student’s information
Alright, so you have X number of students, each of them with basic information like…
- Name
- Phone number
- Address
And then you have everything else, such as financial info, the progress within your pipeline, etc…
The biggest challenge of staying organised is getting all student information stored in one place. Who wants to keep track of all this information in his head or on paper? You don’t want to have a paper trail that can further lose you more student information.
Resolving this challenge requires… *drum roll*
A CRM!!!
A CRM?! What is a CRM?
What is customer relationship management and how should you choose the right CRM solution for your business?
‘Customer relationship management’ or ‘CRM’ for short, translated to an education agency, refers to the technology and processes that a education agencies use to manage their students and relationships, both external and internal, such as:
- Email subscribers
- Student leads
- Student applications
- Education Institutions
- Offices
- Employees
Don’t be tricked by the word ‘customers’ in the term: although one goal is to use this customer data to build and strengthen relationships. CRM can also be used to manage relationships with individuals at all touchpoints.
A customer relationship management tool (CRM tool) for your education agency keeps track of all your students (new, warm, hot, and cold) as well as current students. It’s the best way to keep track of students.
After creating student contacts, a customizable CRM lets you create pipelines that show students’ progress through stages such as: new, warm, hot, or cold, as well as pipelines that tracks their applications through stages such as: Created, Submitted, GTE, Offer Letter, CoE, etc…
This type of flow for keeping track of students helps you keep them from “slipping through the cracks.”
Convinced that adopting CRM software is the next step in your growth plans? Then your first task is to figure out which one will work best for you and your team, and then to evaluate the benefits of using a CRM.
There are a few things you should consider:
- Ask yourself if you really need a CRM tool
- Do your homework before you start CRM shopping
- Keep your key CRM stakeholders in mindStudent applications
Small education agency owners may also want to look at CRM providers (like Inteleagent) that cater to the small education agency model. Some CRMs may offer more features than you may use in your education agency. So, you should consider both your budget and expected needs when choosing a CRM.
2. How to get the information you need from students
Before starting to do the work for your students, you need to get information from them.
Your students have the information you need to get started, but sometimes there are roadblocks such as:
- Getting students to reply to you at all
- Getting students to trust you with their information
Trust is huge with students and their parents. Whether they are a current student or a new one, students and their parents always need reassurance that they can trust your education agency with their information.
A survey done by Label Insight found that 94% of the 2000 people surveyed said they would be more loyal to a company if the company would be more transparent with them.
The best way to get information from students and their parents is to be transparent about how you care for their personal information. There are a few ways you can do it.
- Put into writing exactly what you’re doing with their info once it’s in your possession (don’t let the assume)
- Use tools like custom fields, phone calls, and onboarding emails to convey trust and get useful information
3. Knowing when and how to follow up
Once you have students, how do you stay in touch with them? How do you keep up to date with their applications?
I bet the following are not new for you, if you’ve been an education agent for a short while:
- Just checking in to see where my application is at
- When do you think you’ll be able to have this for me?
- How come I never heard back from you?
- Per my last email...
How do you follow-up and how do you keep track of follow-ups?
Too much contact and you’ll come off as spammy and clingy. Not enough and you could loose them. You need to set expectations early so clients know what their relationship with you looks like.
This takes planning and planning takes organisation.
Lack of organisation sends the message that your follow-up procedures are inconsistent. Once you get to that stage, you’ll start seeing students falling through the cracks.
The last thing you need is to forget to make a follow-up call, send a check-in email or miss a booked appointment and loose a student.
When you keep in touch with students, you want to actually connect with them. That means you need to send emails and schedule calls at times when they will answer them.
To nail down your timing, consider:
- how often a person is willing to hear from you before they label you ‘high maintenance’
- what tools can help you communicate successfully
You can use a CRM like Inteleagent to keep track of what stage an application is in, then use the information to follow-up with the client accordingly.
Now you need something to help with the actual scheduling. You need a system that tells you when to follow-up so that you don’t lose track of all students and applications to follow-up with.
You can use the task management system Inteleagent offers to schedule reminders to follow up. You’ll be notified via email a day before your task is due, so you know what you have to do.
4. How to invoice your education providers for your agent commission
Next to personal information, money and financial information are some of the most important things.
Unless you want to get back to the Flinstones era of chiselling on stone, you need a system that can be kept up manually and automatically.
To make it easier, use Inteleagent’s automatic invoicing system. When ever you get the Offer Letter for a student application, create instalments in Inteleagent. All you need is the instalment due date and the instalment amount, Everything else will automatically be calculated by Inteleagent. The system will even remind you when you need to raise the invoice. You’ll be able to generate a pdf invoice in Inteleagent at the click of a button and you can even set it to be sent automatically to the education provider.
Conclusion: How to keep track of student information
Students require a lot of attention and upkeep, and without organisation, you’ll constantly be on edge making sure everything is covered.
Education agency owners have to play several roles and balance multiple tasks efficiently. If you’re systems are not properly organised…
Tasks and stress pile up
Students can get lost in the shuffle
You waste valuable time
Having good organisational systems to help you keep track of student’s information will let you breathe a sigh of relief.
