Education consultancy is a complex field where managing leads, tasks and student engagement is crucial for success. As the industry becomes more competitive, the right tools are needed more than ever. This is why we’re going to introduce you to education consultancy software. It is beneficial, especially for educational consultants. It offers a range of unique features that can boost your productivity and the success of your organization and clients.
This article will discuss the features that should be present in any education consultancy software. Whether you are an absolute beginner or considering improving your existing consultancy, you’re in the right place. Familiarizing yourself with these aspects is the first and most crucial step towards boosting your consultancy’s efficiency.
I. Must-have Features of Education Consultant Software
1. Consolidate all high-quality leads within your pipeline
The ability to consolidate leads is a revolutionary feature in education consultancy software. It consolidates student inquiries and brings leads from websites and third-party applications. Thanks to lead validation, which minimizes the risk of lead leakage, the counseling teams’ work is more efficient. Other add-on features of lead consolidation include:
- Lead source tracking: This helps teams track the sources of their leads and improve their strategies.
- Responsive landing page builder: Allows the development of more appropriate pages to capture leads adequately.
- Website widget: This widget allows you to place forms directly on your site. It integrates well with lead ad connectors and remarketing tools to help drive the most impact with the marketing audience.
- Conversion tags: Enables one to get a lead performance report, enabling the teams to make adjustments and improve results.
2. Streamline daily tasks using the workflow builder
Education consultancy software is an efficient tool. It improves productivity through automating routine processes using an intelligent workflow designer. It cuts the work done manually by setting up particular workflows and alerts for the different teams. This enhances the lead conversion process and increases overall productivity. Some of this feature’s key characteristics are:
- One-view lead profile: Allows gathering all necessary information about the leads in one place.
- Lead verification: Helps to avoid working with low-quality leads.
- Custom fields and tabs: Help to structure the data most conveniently.
- Lead scoring and strength indicators: Ensure that the teams work on suitable leads that are likely to convert.
- Bulk offline upload and the quick add options: Make working with many leads relatively easy.
- Blocking duplicate entries: Prevents the formation of similar records, making the database clear and free from errors.
In general, this automation feature of the education consultancy software helps the teams to be more productive and efficient.
3. Monitor counselor performance by course, intake date, and additional criteria
Another must-have feature of an education consultancy software is multi-data monitoring. It should record the counselor’s activities following course and intake dates, providing a holistic view of your team. Some of the main characteristics of this feature include:
- Robust custom dashboard: This brings together critical metrics, enabling you to track conversions, engagement, and calling activity in one place.
- Customized reports: It has a report builder where one can develop comprehensive and customized reports. These can be used to track counselor performance and productivity, showing the former’s strengths and gaps.
- Filters: more specific, enabling you to narrow your data by particular factors to work on the most appropriate data.
- Calling reports: Describes the frequency and success of the counselor’s outreach
- Lead engagement reports: Describe how healthy counselors engage with potential students. With this data, you can focus on counseling and improve the application support, so your team works effectively.
4. Speed up enrollment with an integrated payment system
With the help of education consultancy software, you can speed up the enrollment process by having a payment system. You can quickly launch time-sensitive promotion offers, create payment links, and track the results of the application. The standout qualities of this feature are:
- Automate the payment reminders: This will help minimize follow-ups and fee collection. There are many payment processes, and the payment options, such as payment proportions and late fees, can be easily customized.
- Payments across multiple accounts: Can be made quickly, while reconciliation and settlement reports help with the transactions.
- Automatic processing of GST and surcharges: Helps you meet the country’s financial regulations.
Overall, this financial-centered tool in education consultancy software allows institutions to enhance payment management, cash flow, and enrollment.
5. Provide targeted nurturing for all prospective students
Education consultancy software allows for the contextual follow-up of prospective students through Email, SMS, and WhatsApp marketing communication channels. This automation is initiated by the student’s actions and interactions at different stages, which makes it possible to provide individual and timely communication. This feature is characterized by:
- Communication package: The software has a complete communication package that guarantees that all communication is well coordinated.
- Drag-and-drop email template: Using the drag-and-drop email template builder, you can create your own HTML email templates or use one of the ready-to-use templates.
- Drip marketing automation & workflow builder: The drip marketing automation and workflow builder make communication even more efficient and take prospects through enrollment.
- Communication performance reports & tracking: It also offers detailed communication performance reports and tracking that enable one to evaluate the success of the campaigns and adjust the strategies used.
Through these tools, the education consultancy software ensures that your outreach is well coordinated, appealing, and effective in turning prospective students into enrollments for the partnered institutions.
6. Harness the capabilities of a unified student enrollment portal
One important characteristic of education consultancy software is that it provides a single sign-on portal for the students to apply. This feature helps increase student satisfaction and enrollment. This portal provides students with an interactive console and a home page with a single window where the student can apply for programs, check the application status, interact with the counselor, and access other services. Some of the notable options available with this feature are:
- My payment: This option enables students to make and track their transactions, making the payment process more transparent.
- My queries: The “My Queries” section allows students to submit questions and track their responses, contributing to efficient communication.
- My communication: The “My Communication” option centralizes all the communication between the student and the institution to avoid confusion and disorganization.
The integration of this unified portal will increase the functionality of the education consultancy software, improving the student experience. Hence, institutions can enhance the enrollment process, increasing engagement and retention.
7. Spot opportunities for upselling and cross-selling
Identifying business opportunities is the next crucial feature within education consultancy software. It is designed to help institutions find upsell and cross-sell opportunities to improve student outcomes and revenue streams. By analyzing candidates’ profiles and activity, the software can identify the student’s specific needs. For instance, whether they might be interested in more courses or need to improve in IELTS or SAT.
This way, the institution is proactive in directing students to the right programs for enrollment and increasing its revenue. It also integrates loan providers, accommodation services, and forex solutions so that students can access them from just one platform.
Custom tabs and fields allow the platform to be customized and utilize any upsell or cross-sell chance. Educators with education consultancy software can then assist the learners in reaching academic goals and help the institution generate the highest possible revenue.
8. Boost your marketing campaign’s ROI
Are you struggling to manage and evaluate your marketing efforts? Then this feature is what’s gonna save you from all the hard work! Education consultancy software is aimed at helping you to get the most out of your marketing investments. This is done by tracking, measuring, and optimizing your enrollment marketing initiatives in real-time. Notable options include:
- Campaign dashboard: The campaign dashboard gives an overview of all your marketing activities so that you can track their performance.
- Comparative benchmark: Comparative benchmarking helps you compare one campaign’s performance with the other, thus ensuring that your strategies are always up to date.
- Lead verification index: The lead verification index helps avoid chasing low-quality leads and increases the campaign’s conversion rates.
- Channel and inventory classification: Channel and inventory classification categorizes leads according to the channel they come from and the potential value of the inventory.
- Mutually exclusive impact: The MEI analysis provides information about each marketing channel’s individual contribution, which is helpful in resource allocation.
- Source performance report: The source performance report provides a detailed analysis of each channel’s performance. This helps constantly enhance the marketing activities within the education consultancy software.
9. Create and download comprehensive reports
Reporting and data visualization are also among the core features of education consultancy software. The platform improves decision-making by generating and downloading comprehensive reports that reveal the performance of the team and operation efficiency. Its characteristics are:
- Inquiry into enrollment funneling: Allows for observing the entire student journey from when they inquire to when they enroll and where gaps need to be addressed.
- Report builder: This tool enables users to create reports simply by dragging and dropping them to generate a report of their choice and format. This flexibility is supported by the functionality of monitoring sales and counselors’ performance. Their combined result provides essential indicators of efficiency and activity.
- Visual dashlets: It also offers more than 100 sophisticated visual dashlets that help to represent sophisticated information comprehensibly.
These features help institutions monitor critical success factors, such as conversion rates and visa processing time, to make decisions and improve processes.
10. Gain complete control with advanced user management features
Education consultancy software also has enhanced user control, enabling the institutions to have the best control over data access and security. Significant points this feature has are:
- Role-based access: In role-based access, you can assign certain rights to specific users. Thus, the members of a particular team can only access data relevant to their work.
- Management of teams and hierarchy: Teams can be divided according to the universities, courses, or any other criteria the user wants. All the information can be shared within the team while keeping access rights in mind.
- User sessions & audit logs: User sessions and audit logs offer a rich source of information about the system usage, improving control and openness.
- Data masking: Data masking tools ensure that personal information is concealed to enhance the privacy and compliance of the data.
- IP access control: The IP access control restricts system access to specific locations, thus protecting data from unauthorized access.
- Permission templates: Permission templates are helpful in setting up access controls since they make the process easy to manage and standard.
When combined, these features ensure the effective and secure handling of users, which is essential for the functioning and security of the education consultancy software.
11. Oversee counselors and their sessions effectively
The best features for managing counselors and their sessions are also integrated into education consultancy software. These include lead distribution and performance analysis features. Specifically, they provide:
- Sophisticated lead distribution: The enhanced lead management system lets you filter and distribute leads to counsel teams by country, university, conversion rate, or course. This way, leads are well aligned with the right counselors to attend to them.
- Smart view: Smart views give a clear, systematic outlook of the lead assignments and counseling activities.
- Cloud telephony integration: Cloud telephony integration helps bridge the communication gap between counselors and prospective students, thus making the interaction fast and effective.
- Comprehensive communication package: The communication suite centralizes all communication so that the counselors have a broad perspective of the interactions.
- Task and follow-up: Tasks and follow-up features are used to monitor and control counselor actions and interactions, ensuring timely responses and interactions.
- Performance report: counselor performance reporting enables the assessment of individual and team performance, the evaluation of efforts and results, the improvement of the approaches used, and the increase in general efficiency.
12. Utilize WhatsApp Business API for dynamic student engagement
As they often say, “Save the best for last!”. This final feature is truly one of the best ones that education consultancy software possesses. That is, integrating the WhatsApp Business API to engage potential students in an active conversation on their platform of choice. Here’s what you can do with this feature:
- Communication templates: You can build your communication templates for your specific use. You can also use the system to conduct hyper-targeted outreach campaigns to make all the interactions meaningful.
- Communication automation: Automated communication and immediate follow-up increase prospects’ involvement and satisfaction, thus raising the chances of enrolment.
- Messaging extension: Multimedia messaging extension lets you share media content, pictures, videos, and many others with your friends, thus enhancing your communication.
This feature is efficient in the counselor’s work schedule and interaction with the clients and in terms of marketing effectiveness. It is because it offers a more straightforward and efficient way of reaching the target audience. Finally, integrating the WhatsApp Business API into the education consultancy software makes increasing enrollment through better connections and communication possible.
II. Why an Education Consultancy Should Have a Custom Software
1. Optimized student relationship management
Education consultancy software manages and organizes details like contact information, academic information, preferred options, and previous communication history. This method centralizes information, which means that all data is available in one system. This allows for a personal approach and understanding of each student’s needs.
2. Enhanced communication efficiency
Communication is essential in the education consultancy business. Education consultancy software also makes communication easier through features such as email management and sending reminders and follow-ups. This helps consultants effectively engage with prospective students, provide timely updates, and be fully engaged throughout the students’ lifecycle.
3. Effective lead and inquiry management
Education consultancies receive many queries and leads that they have to handle regularly. They are best handled with the help of custom education consultancy software. It enables consultants to monitor each lead, from contacting them to enrolling. Moreover, it helps consultants automate the lead assignment, interaction tracking, and the assessment of the progress of the inquiries. This custom software will help you achieve better lead management and higher success rates.
4. Data-driven strategic decisions
Custom education consultancy software captures student engagement data, enrolment patterns, and marketing campaigns. This data benefits the education consultancies by providing them with information on their strategies. This information can help coordinate the marketing strategies, determine the ways of conversion, and improve the usage of the resources for better outcomes.
5. Enhanced team collaboration and workflow
Education consultancies often have several people on a team dealing with different student recruitment and support facets. Custom software enhances collaboration since all parties can work on the same system and share information in real-time. This eradicates redundancy and guarantees that work is done effectively and productively.
Also read: How Much Does It Cost to Develop Education Management Software
III. Why Choose Adamo to Help You Build a Bespoke Education Consultancy Software
All of the above features make having custom-made education consultancy software promising. But building everything on your own might be overwhelming, especially if you have yet to gain prior experience. Therefore, seeking help from a professional software development company like Adamo Software is an excellent choice.
Adamo Software is a premier software development company based in Vietnam. We have years of experience building custom software for clients in various industries, including education. Therefore, we’ve gained a deep understanding of the industry’s requirements and possible challenges that could help you brainstorm the best software for your institution. Our team of experts will ensure you can get the most user-friendly, efficient, and scalable platforms. Using cutting-edge technology and an effective project management approach, Adamo empowers education software development to streamline operations, enhance student experiences, and drive growth.
Ready to set your institution apart? Contact us today to schedule a consultation and start building software to level up your educational services.