Success as an agent isn’t just about pairing students up with their ideal educators. While that may be the core of the business, there are a lot of ways to go about it with some methods being more successful than others. Here’s a selection of some of the best strategies we’ve discovered that any agent should be adopting already.
Business is Personal
In today’s social media obsessed world more and more people are interacting on-line via mediums such as Facebook and twitter. This is a great way to both make connections with your students as well as discover more about them. You can discover likes and dislikes of your potential customers, which will better help you align solutions to their needs. For example, if you see your client enjoys live music you might recommend study in a city with a vibrant musical scene.
Don’t ask “What?” ask “Why?”
The basic question that comes up time and time again when dealing with students is “What course are you looking for?” usually followed ones like “When are you going?” and “Have you got your travel arrangements planned?”. For the savvy agent however, the better question is “Why do you want to do this course?”.
Remember that there are thousands of possibilities for every student, most of which will also be offered by your competition. That’s why it’s important to find out the underlying reasons for your students inquiry. Are they looking for a course that is far from their parents or close to home? Perhaps they wish to master a foreign language? Whatever the real reason, discovering it and making recommendations that build on it will give you the means to offer unique, tailored solutions for your client.
Keeping the ball in the Students Court
Once you’ve gotten the students interest, make sure that it is always the student who needs time to think about things and not yourself. Being responsive and quick on any inquiry given to you as a Agent is not only good customer service, it’s essential if you want to turn your prospect into a sale.
But take care not to leave the student mulling things over for too long. If you don’t hear back from them it never hurts to make a courtesy call offering any further assistance as an invitation to further dialogue. Don’t let tardiness on your part be the reason a student chose to go with a provider that seemed to care more to respond to them.
Discover your bottlenecks
Following on from the above, discover in your business processes where your sales flow has problems. Are you having problems finding potential students? Or maybe your company is good at getting initial inquiries but lousy at getting back to customers in time? Wherever problems might lurk, being aware of them is the first step to correcting them with better practices.
Have a Proper Strategy for Sharing Information
Leaving everything in your e-mail inbox is not a sound strategy for keeping yourself organised. Neither is creating a really big excel sheet. Both are horribly inefficient and will hurt your attempts to remain responsive and customer focussed as you try to find Student visa documents and acceptance letters in a digital landfill. This is made all the worse if only one or two key staff members have access to the information.
Take advantage of modern technology solution. On-line cloud storage facilities such as Google Drive allow agents the ability to share files and information easily. If security is an issue or you otherwise don’t want files on-line a shared network drive on your agency network provides another option for storage and sharing of key information. Whatever you decide any such solution will be useless unless you take the time to organize it properly. Keeping important documents for individual students together is one useful tip.
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