Student helper talking to a member of staff

July 3, 2015, by Ryan Neal

4,800 enquiries logged — take a look at the reporting tool

Our new enquiries form has been live for over a month now. Taking enquiries for the central enquiry teams in China, the UK and Malaysia, the International Office, Nottingham University Business School, and the Schools of Economics and Health Sciences, we are now approaching 5,000 enquiries for the UK campus. Of course, this is just a small portion of the enquiries that we usually receive, and enquiries from teams not currently using the new form are still pouring in, but we thought that this would be a good opportunity to show you what things look like in our system.

Our new enquiries tool provides a reporting function that allows us to monitor the behaviour of enquiries and record the data of these prospective students for future use. As you can see from the screenshot below, by selecting a campus, we can see how many enquiries were received for that campus per day for any given time period.Graph displaying enquiries volume over time

The graph above shows that for the selected time period we received an average of 50 queries per day, but we can break that down even further. Take a look at the screenshot below – the tool allows us to distinguish between query types; we can see how many prospects are downloading a prospectus, and how many are actively asking questions. The red dots represent prospectus requests while the blue dots represent enquiries.

Graph showing enquiries and prospectus requests volume over time

By tracking the number of enquiries over a given time period, we are able to draw conclusions about the level of interest for The University of Nottingham and track how these evolve over time. We can even see which countries the enquiries are coming from. As we might expect, the vast majority of enquiries for the UK campus come from the UK itself, but we can also see that we’re getting a number of international enquiries from various different countries:

Graph showing the location of enquiries

This allows us to draw conclusions regarding The University of Nottingham’s reputation. If we want to attract more international students, then we can see where our efforts need to be directed.

As we mentioned in a previous post about the new enquiries form, we are using the data collected from these forms to build student records. Every time an enquiry is submitted, all of the data in that submission is fed into our database. Below you can see just some of the data that is recorded:

This enables us to store the prospect’s personal and contact details, details about the course being enquired about, as well as the actual query itself. The data can be used to create the basis of the student records while the list of queries could be used to create potential FAQ sheets or to better organise the information on our website. By recording which courses are being enquired about we can also gauge the level of interest for each course and identify any particular areas of confusion for potential students in order to deliver a better service.

Of course, enquiries are still pouring in across the University for all of the Schools and departments not currently using the new form.  They will switch across to the new form in September when it is implemented as part of GoLive 2, at which point we will have a much larger selection of data to work with.

After seeing some capabilities and advantages of the new enquiries system, we hope you’re as excited as we are to see what else Project Transform has in store. Subscribe to our blog to avoid missing out on the latest updates.

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