The coronavirus pandemic has changed how businesses interact and communicate with customers. Limited or no contact mandates have pushed businesses to find other ways to personally communicate with customers. One strategy some businesses have turned to is a messaging channel. In fact, during the first few months of the pandemic, the use of a messaging channel to interact with customers increased by 26%. At the same time, businesses are still learning to manage a messaging channel. Our company provides a 2-way messaging channel for businesses to interact with their customers. Two-way messaging is different from SMS messaging. SMS messages are...
Student retention is one of the major issues in higher education with the undergraduate graduation rate hovering around 60% (NCES). Freshmen arrive on campus excited and ready for a great experience. Once the welcome week is over and classes begin reality sets in. Communication is the key to success in any relationship including the relationship between a university and its students. With class schedules in full swing, communicating students can be more challenging. When students start to struggle, support resources available to them are forgotten and difficult to find. A strong communication strategy that keeps students engaged will have a positive...
Communicating with college students and their parents can be challenging. There is a lot of information to convey and a variety of ways the information can be delivered. In an effort to save time, all the information a student or parent needs to know about an event, such as graduation or student orientation, is often packed into a single email or sent in a big information packet through the mail. The amount of information is overwhelming and is barely read. If it is, readers will typically get a few high-level points, missing many of the important details. As a result,...
A common problem we hear is that college students don’t read their emails. In one survey, nearly 40% of students reported that they don’t open emails from academic advisors, more than half don’t read emails from their academic department, and 72% treat emails from student organizations like spam. Commencement and first-year experience offices express the same frustrations. Emails they send to students and parents with important information and resources they need, go unread. So, why don’t students read these emails?! We decided to do some research into why and here is what we discovered. Moving Between Devices 98% of people use multiple...
Messaging has become the communication channel of choice. Messaging is instant and makes communication with people half way across the world not only possible, but completely free. These advances haven’t just changed the way people communicate with each other, they’ve changed the way businesses communicate with their customers. Here are four messaging options businesses leverage to communicate with their customers: Text Messaging Today, texting is the most prevalent form of communication worldwide. Text messages have a 99% open rate, one of the highest open rates of all communication forms. One of the most common forms of texting used by businesses...
