Empowering Education through Live Chat

Live Chat goes beyond the Marketplace to Serve Society
The fact that many non-profit organizations use live chat in order to deliver a full spectrum of meaningful services may not come to you as a surprise. You have probably visited the websites of philanthropy groups in your quest to locate a good cause to support. You have probably used live chat on their sites to ask questions regarding their service delivery models or to learn more about how they plan to use your contributions. Educational institutions, most of which are also non-profit, have also begun to use live chat in record numbers to facilitate a journey from school hood to collegehood. The transition is by no means simple. Ask around and you will find college bound kids struggling with the process. Compare it with your own college admission experience and you will instantly know what we mean.

The Saving Grace
Those colleges and universities, which provide live chat on their websites, are able to resolve issues related to admission, answer questions and provide guidance in ways that even traditional telephone-based customer service lines are not able to deliver. What we have provided here is a bird’s eye overview of how many of our fine customers in the higher education vertical are currently using live chat on their respective websites. This data is based on more than four years of experience, innovation and research, which we are now able to share with you.

College Admissions Counseling
The admissions buck always starts with the college admissions counselor. Although much if not most of the information a college student or you as the parent of a college bound child would need is typically available on the university’s website, some of this information such as information pertaining to lateral transfers, transfer of credits and fulfillment of specific departmental requirements is difficult to locate. The transfer feature of live chat, which is also available in our live chat software, allows admission counselors to directly transfer a chat to the Dean’s office or the Department head’s office in a quest for direct and accurate answers. The highly interactive nature of live chat allows for follow-up questions and a satisfactory conclusion to the student’s query.

Financial Aid Counseling

The current state of the economy has made it extremely difficult for parents to entirely support the higher education of their children. Live chat is being used by many colleges and universities to provide individualized attention and personalized answers to questions regarding college financial aid. The PUSH URL feature provided by live chat is extremely handy since it enables financial aid counselors to show students the web pages of funding sources beyond the college or university. Additionally, assistance is also being provided through live chat to enable students to complete online financial aid forms correctly, especially the US Federal student financial aid forms which tend to be quite complicated. Highly specific questions regarding eligibility and deadlines are also being addressed in real time.

The Chat Transcript Advantage
When students or parents conclude a live chat session with a college counselor or staff member, they can request a copy of the chat transcript. This provides them with a clean and written record of the interaction for future use and follow up. Since the university knows that a written record of the transaction is always generated, queries are managed with an additional sense of accuracy and responsibility.

Conclusion
If you work for a university, college, trade school, tutoring service, learning center or a training services provider, live chat can help you streamline your customer engagement model for a few cents a day. The investment is minimal and the benefits are phenomenal. There are many highly successful instance of live chat integration with university and college websites. Ask us for a few instances and we will be more than happy to show you how live chat can indeed heighten the positive levels of interactivity between your target audience and their parents.