“Where do I start?” Navigating college admissions, financial aid, and degree programs can be challenging. Students and higher education administrators deal with this daily. Finding a live person to talk to at a university or college is fraught with obstacles and frustrating for everyone.
At Molly Duggan Associates, we work with leaders in higher education everyday to solve problems concerning their websites’ effectiveness. The “go-to” solution has often been a website redesign. But that’s not the only available path. A website redesign involves a discovery and strategy process to unearth pain points. From there, we develop a plan, redesign the site, and improve the website navigation and user experience while enhancing online brand positioning. And that can take significant resources and time.
But, what happens when you need a solution now?
If you’re redesigning your website, stay the course. A website should be refreshed regularly. Buy if you need to help your visitors right now — even before you’ve rebuilt your website — this article is for you.
And here are some solid reasons why.
GroundHog Day
We all know it can be tiresome to answer the same questions day after day. Let’s start with questions that visitors ask frequently when visiting your website. How do I apply? How do I fill out a FAFSA? Who should I talk to? Questions like these are a small sample size of a very long list for the Admissions staff.
If you work in Financial Aid, questions asked by students are often fraught with anxiety and critical to their educational goals. Questions like: “How do I apply for Financial Aid?” “How much debt do students have when they graduate?” “What percentage of students graduate with debt?” Are you starting to see a theme here? Every day, people need answers to questions 24/7.
Suppose you’re in charge of Alumni relations. In that case, you’ve worked hard to create content worth sharing. You’re engaging your community with compelling news stories and highlighting alumni talents. But, are you attracting alumni to your digital assets with contextual and personalized content? Oops. Maybe not so much.
While you are working hard to attract people to your website, from prospective students to alumni, are you delivering what they need through evergreen social media content and advertising?
Stuck in a Maze | Complicated Websites
Higher education websites are complicated and visitors often leave feeling frustrated and without the information they were hoping to find. Some higher education websites are so challenging to navigate that they lose prospective students altogether.
Try thinking of your website as a physical environment where you are hosting an event. You’ve sent an invite to a fabulous soiree, but when your guests arrive, there’s no one to greet them, take their coat, provide a name tag, show them to their assigned seat or explain there’s a “free” open bar. That would be a terrible way to host an event, wouldn’t it?
What if your website were like that fabulous soiree except this time with amazingly helpful hosts making suggestions at every turn, anticipating your guests’ personalized needs? What if everyone greeted the guest by name, kept track of their favorite drinks or offered them a napkin before they knew they needed it?
Your Website Gets a Brilliant Host
Your website can be so much more. Even if it is an unwieldy maze you can still help your visitors find information with a little added intelligence. Just imagine an intelligent virtual assistant greeting your visitors by name and helping them to navigate the information that they are actually looking for. Imagine removing 100’s or even 1,000’s of emails with the subject line, “Where should I start?” from your inbox.
Imagine having a contextual conversation with every visitor that acts as a guide through every step of their journey.
Molly Duggan Associates has been working with universities from coast to coast for over a decade. From UCLA to Johns Hopkins we deliver measurable results— making it easier for staff and students alike to succeed.
We understand higher education and we get the needs of your audiences. In fact, we can actually help you anticipate the needs of all your website visitors. Our Conversation Orchestrator service, powered by Drift — the world’s leading virtual assistant technology – is the fastest way to provide self-service to your website visitors and drive instant results.
Hundreds of companies have employed Molly Duggan Associates to accelerate their revenue with Conversation Orchestrator by providing contextual conversations at the right time and on the right web pages. Now, we’re converting that same revenue-accelerating power into virtual assistants that empower and inform higher education website visitors 24/7.
Here’s the best part! Conversation Orchestrator can effortlessly integrate with CRM, Calendars, and even ERP.
Start greeting your visitors by name and create contextual conversations while offering helpful and friendly guidance at every turn.
Curious if Conversation Orchestrator is right for your university or college? Schedule a demo with our conversation orchestrator today.
