Students' expectations from university, especially regarding online interactions and courses, have increased significantly. They expect and demand education that reflects their preferred learning styles, interests, and continued relevance to the professions they wish to pursue.
They want the same modern, fluid, seamless, and personalized experiences on campus, in university offices, and with their professors.
Research shows that 94% of students believe connecting with faculty, and other students, receiving course suggestions, and getting notifications about deadlines based on academic performance and interest would help them feel more connected to their institutions.
With many students now attending college classes remotely, potential students are rating digital interactions at the beginning of their college search as the run-through for the learning experience.
Hybrid and online learning has become the new norm. A sharp drop in the digital experience quality after a student enrolls could affect an institution's reputation and, ultimately, a student's experience.
To succeed in this new landscape, colleges and universities must rise to the occasion and provide a high-quality digital experience for all students, both remotely and on campus. In this blog, we'll explore how a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) provides educational institutions with access to information and applications while offering a new level of personalization to understand better the needs of their students, alumni, staff, and community members.
Understanding personalized university journeys
Students are looking for a meaningful digital experience that is more personal and relevant, so any differentiator, especially when it comes to personalizing content, can make a huge difference.
University and college websites and apps fail to create a more personalized user experience. Around 58% of students reported that of all the brands they engage with, their institution is furthest behind in personalizing their experience.
Universities need a way to syndicate content across all channels and understand user preferences to better engage with their students.
To understand personalized journeys, we need to look at what end users expect:
- Personalized support and information
- Easy access to information
- They want to avoid too many frustrating barriers
For higher education institutions to achieve this, they must understand their users, create relevant and exciting content, and personalize it. This process should then be automated.
DXP: Solving higher education’s personalization problems
DXP unifies the siloed systems for managing websites, landing pages, analytics, email campaigns, and CRM-powered content.
DXP enables personalization by defining audience segments with robust rules for fine-grained personalization and engaging these segments with a wide range of personalized experiences across pages, navigation, and assets.
This allows for a much more customized and individualized user experience tailored to each student’s needs and interests.
DXP provides a differentiated digital experience and offers personalization
Meeting student needs
Each student gets their profile, populated with data from all channels and devices, that helps them to get personalized experiences in real time!
Further, a DXP can
• Segment audiences based on user behavior, location, and role
• Deliver personalized content and web pages to specific segments
• Aggregate student data across silos
Meeting marketing and communication needs
Engaging users with relevant and targeted content can increase conversions
DXPs provide personalized user experiences and actionable content based on analytics-driven insights. With this, users can access all decision-aiding tools, predictive recommendations, and relationship-enhancing features.
Universities can leverage built-in analytics to track customer engagement metrics, calculate ROI, and leverage A/B testing, web analytics, and social analytics to continuously test the effectiveness of the experience. The insights are drawn from metrics to improve user experience and to make informed decisions
Meeting teachers and staff needs
It offers a connected digital tool to deliver personalized news feeds to improve overall productivity and encourage collaboration through blogs, forums, and knowledge management.
DXP can personalize experiences based on different roles and permissions. For example, a user with the administrator role can have a different experience than a user with the role of teacher.
Bringing collaboration
Teacher, partner, and team member collaboration is essential for fostering engagement. Collaboration enables organizations to innovate, collect data, and provide better customer service in the education sector.
Converting a visitor into a brand advocate
Through personalized content and seamless omnichannel access, DXPs could develop deep engagements with customers. DXPs can convert a short-term transaction-based customer interaction to a long-term strategic relationship through user engagement features.
Predictive insights
Omnichannel analytics-driven insights can be leveraged to offer personalized recommendations. Based on trend analysis, business stakeholders can predict future trends, such as seasonal traffic spikes, holiday traffic size, etc., and be prepared to handle the scenarios.
DXP: Providing unified solutions for universities
Stanford Graduate School of Business
QED42 has redesigned GSB’s web and mobile experiences with an intuitive UI. Delivering a flawless experience for course selections and information access and elevated their mobile experiences.
Results:
- Enriched digital experiences for GSB's aspiring and current students, lifelong learners, alums, and staff
- Elevated and simplified the course selection experiences for students with modernized platforms
- Redefined their mobile experiences for students and faculty with a revamped information architecture
- Powered GSB's non-technical staff to create, launch, & manage pages and content independently
University of London
The University of London adopted a DXP to enhance its student portal with a responsive design and engaging experiences for its students.
Results:
- Improved student experience for over 170,000 students across the globe
- Empowered business users to manage experiences independent of IT
- Increased student engagement by offering a consistent experience across multiple touchpoints
Griffith University
Griffith University designed a personalized experience using DXP to engage new students with a digitalized orientation process.
Results:
The MyOrientation app.
- Guides students through the various activities they must complete before arriving on campus
- Able to track all students' orientation progress
- Administrators are able to send tailored communications to provide the necessary support
- Tailor a personalized experience quickly based on what it already knew about students
- The plug-in components enabled the university to provide automated first-day planners, drawing information from students’ existing attributes
Capella University
Capella University is a leading online university that needed a new platform to integrate all of its technologies for a unified, personalized, intuitive user experience. They built a tool using DXP to support their student's academic growth.
Results:
- Displays real-time academic activity for each student through personalized course dashboards
- Students were able to customize their Degree Completion Plan
- Integrates LMS, student resources, and grades on one platform
DXP: Achieving digital excellence at universities
The digital landscape is constantly changing, and educational institutions must keep up with the pace of change to remain competitive.
Students are looking for more value, innovation, and interconnected digital experiences from higher education institutions.
Leverage DXPs to achieve digital excellence and drive deeper engagement with your students, faculty, alumni, and prospective students.