Ancillary services play a major role in the success of a school. Generating recurring revenue and providing students with the resources they need to make the most of their experience.
And while the latest services and products can be beneficial in enhancing revenue, focusing on the experience and ways to drive student satisfaction can be even more impactful.
In this blog, we’re uncovering just how powerful student sentiment is with 3 ways satisfaction impacts ancillary revenue.
The Impact of Student Satisfaction on Ancillary Revenue
Students Become Loyal
Loyalty is any business or schools, greatest source of revenue. In fact, it was reported by Harvard Business Review, that “increasing customer retention by just 5% boosts profits by 25% to 95%”.
One of the greatest ways to increase loyalty is by creating happy students. Happy students reflect a great experience and they feel valued, both ingredients for a repeat visit. By taking the necessary precautions to ensure satisfaction, whether through maintaining bathrooms, tidying lecture halls and ensuring sufficient school store inventory, you build a thriving experience that students look forward to revisiting.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Word-of-mouth marketing plays a substantial role in acquiring new customers. If a student is happy about their experience, there’s a good chance they’ll recommend it to classmates. Not only does this increase potential new customers but it also enriches your reputation.
Keeping that in mind, word-of-mouth marketing can be a double-edged sword. According to Esteban Kolsky9, 72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people. On the other hand, if a customer is not happy, 13% of them will share their experience with 15 or more. While positive word-of-mouth marketing is key to a thriving school, negative sentiments can do some major damage. Students complaining about poor service is a major detractor and can hinder customers from shopping before they step foot on your campus – inhibiting connections and leading to lost revenue.
Keep Students on Campus
The last thing you want is students going out of their way to make a purchase they could have done on campus. Having happy customers gives you the ultimate competitive advantage. If customers know you’ll deliver a great experience time and time again, why would they go anywhere else? By consistently providing a great experience that drives satisfaction, you keep your students comfortable on campus.
The Bottom Line: Student Satisfaction Leads To More Revenue
No matter which way you look at it, students that are happy with their experience stay on campus and spend more money. They become advocates of not just your ancillary services but your school as a whole, maintaining loyalty and encouraging others to spend.
In addition, happy students also add indirect monetary value through an enriched reputation, enlightened faculty experience, and a more welcoming environment for others.
How To Measure The Student Experience
Customer satisfaction clearly plays a vital role in the success of your ancillary services. So how can you ensure you’re consistently making students happy?
The answer is measuring the student experience. By measuring the experience you can understand student preferences, trends on campus and ways to improve the experience as a whole. Here we’re sharing some tips to get you started so you can measure the student experience for success.
Build a Plan
From determining a goal to understanding the student journey, to selecting touchpoints and channels, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes of a successful measurement program.
Before you can begin asking students questions, it’s important to build a robust plan of action so you and your team can stay aligned. This should include goal, time frame, budget, technology considerations, teams involved, and more. It should be a comprehensive document reviewed regularly. If you’re not sure where to start, our blog and eBook library is full of key resources to assist you in your planning.
Understand the Student Journey
As you draft your plan of action, you’ll likely get a better feel of your student journey. This includes key ancillary services that your students interact with regularly and preferred spaces worth honing in on. Make sure you capture each touchpoint that you want to measure. This will be helpful in understanding key touchpoints, how the experience flows, and preferences with on-campus services.
Consider a Customer Experience Solution
Lastly, a measurement program can be a major uplift without the right tools in place. Handing in papers after a class or asking a student to write a comment card in the cafeteria won’t be engaging for the modern student.
When developing your program, consider a customer experience solution that streamlines the entire process. When looking at your options consider one that offers student-preferred channels for maximum engagement. In addition, it should offer robust survey capabilities and data analysis. Surveys should be customizable and you should be presented with options for data visualization.
The Loop Experience Platform Difference
While there are a number of solutions to choose from, the Loop Experience Platform is both robust and comprehensive.
Not only does Loop specifically cater to the higher-education sphere but it offers many key products to better manage the student experience. Here we’ll focus on two.
First, with Loop CX measuring student sentiment is streamlined. Whether a student prefers to reach out on a channel like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or email, you can send personalized surveys to students at critical moments of their journey.
Customize your survey to ask the questions you want in an engaging, familiar way. Stay on brand with a tool kit to manage your logo and colours. Further, whether from the bookstore, print shop, or parking facility, you can set up geofencing QR codes that enable surveys by location. In turn, survey responses become more tailored and you’re able to adjust the experience in a meaningful way.
Following suit, with Loop Inbox, all student conversations are directed to a single location. Regardless of the channel, faculty can see student responses in real-time and choose to communicate immediately or at a later time. Teams can further streamline capabilities with automated workflows that direct specific conversations to the right team member, ensuring a more accurate answer within a short amount of time.
