Enablers for success: Student-centricity

To attract talent, funding and partners, institutions should make it their business to know their students’ needs, priorities and challenges and be obsessive about how these are measured and acted upon. Every institution should consider the below enablers for student centricity.

Framework to monitor student experience: Understanding student needs, priorities and challenges relies on defined mechanisms that measure and generate actionable insights from student feedback, complaint processes and relationship management. Embedding these mechanisms with a continuous improvement process, supported by sound governance, can guide informed change in areas that will maximise benefit.
Student experience: The effective delivery of your brand necessitates the integrated management of digital and real-world interactions of students across their journey with the institution – from application and enrolment to study, graduation and ongoing career development. A consistently delivered high-quality experience for students relies on quality data and well-defined analytics, a collaborative organisational culture and the ability to use data insights to personalise student learning according to their needs, aspirations and preferences.
Industry pathways: Students increasingly expect a university to deliver career outcomes, not just qualifications. The pathways they need rely on industry relationships that are active, enthusiastic, mutually-beneficial and multi-dimensional.
Career-friendly entry and exit points: As labour markets become increasingly volatile and skills need to be regularly augmented, workers are seeking flexibility to start, stop and switch careers in response to labour market fluctuations. Employers are also seeking solutions to short- and medium-term skills shortages that preserve employee flexibility. Traditional 'products' such as undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and the processes that underpin them need redesigning to enable more flexible and responsive products.
A nurtured student pipeline: Future-fit institutions will deploy world class marketing practices to target, attract, engage and nurture students through their application, enrolment and lifelong relationship with their university.

The challenge

A dual-sector University with a diverse customer base with a high proportion of first generation students from low socioeconomic backgrounds had some of the highest student attrition rates in Australia.

There was a disproportionate high drop off rate in the offer-to enrol journey, representing an income loss of several million dollars. Additionally, retention of enrolled students was also a problem too, with many commencing students dropping out early in their student lifecycle.

What we did

PwC were appointed as the University’s ‘experience and digital’ transformation partner, responsible for end-to-end solution design, including: student research, experience strategy, solution design, and digital and technical implementation.

We first identified key insights into the needs of student cohorts to guide design and delivery, such as:

The onboarding experience is a critical moment of truth for incoming students. It is important to get it right, and present a seamless contemporary experience to students.
Needed a way to offer personalised, week by week content that helps students stay engaged in university so they can be successful.
that was easier for new students to understand.

We then delivered:

A prototype developed in just two weeks and co-designed with students which was an effective step in validating the issues, understanding the problem we were trying to solve and obtaining buy-in across the University.
A digital experience layer with a personalised student portal including an enrolment website with integration to legacy systems.
An simpler enrollment process that was easier for new students to understand to address drop-off

The impact we had

The student portal was initially rolled out to 15,000 domestic Higher Education students across Australian and offshore campuses.

The enrollment process was reduced from 16 steps to 5.
It often took students >20 mins to enrol, now, most students enrol in under 4 minutes.
Higher student retention and higher satisfaction
The commencing student load increased by 6%.

In subsequent phases the digital experience layer was adapted to facilitate an innovative and brand defining restructure of all first year course timetables.