The University of Pittsburgh wakes up dormant leads to boost enrollment

Challenge

Like many higher education institutions, the School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh has multiple graduate business programs. Each program has a large database of historical leads that have never turned into applicants or students. These aged records or “dormant leads” have been retained and marketed passively through ongoing CRM email campaigns. Yet, direct outreach is a challenge due to limited budgets, personnel, and the inability to make the volume of calls, per lead, necessary to actually connect with someone in this day and age.

Solution

To reactivate potential students for the Katz Graduate School of Business EMBA programs, GPRS recommended leveraging our Call Center. The contact center is state-of-the-art, and includes technology that enables real-time monitoring, as well as recording capabilities, to ensure that our team is always a consistent extension of our client’s recruiting and admissions departments.

After an in-depth analysis of the program’s dormant records, GPRS developed a comprehensive, outbound calling campaign with the goal of setting up one-to-one calls with the Program’s Director in hopes of moving the interested party further down the enrollment funnel. Additionally, the secondary goal was to update all of the contact records, and identify those who were still interested in the program and wanted more information but were not yet ready to commit to a meeting. Customized scripts were developed to accentuate the value proposition for the programs and a full range of Frequently Asked Questions were created for those who had immediate questions.

Results

Utilizing GPRS’ Contact Center Solution, the University of Pittsburgh, Katz Graduate School of Business was able to convert 22% of their dormant EMBA prospective student database into interested, and active appointments with the Program’s Director. Additionally, the EMBA program received qualitative data on each contacted lead, which enabled them to update their CRM records, as well as identifying “warm” prospects who were not yet ready to enroll, but were genuinely interested in joining a future cohort of the program.