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3 Reasons to Upgrade Your Student Experience Platform

By: Lucie-Kay Desthuis-Francis on Apr 4, 2023 12:00:00 AM
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The right student experience platform serves as the cornerstone of student success.

While there are a lot of solutions out there, unfortunately many of them fall short.

Here are the top reasons why our customers have chosen to upgrade to our student experience platform.

In today’s highly digitized world, technology plays an essential role in the student experience. 

The right student experience platform serves as the cornerstone of student success. It frames how students learn and engage throughout the student journey, helps campuses build and measure community engagement, and contributes to student retention and persistence

While there are a lot of solutions out there, unfortunately many of them fall short. This is generally because they lack a key component that guarantees their success. 

To succeed, a campus-wide technology platform needs to be a true enterprise solution. It needs to integrate with key institution systems and platforms, including your SIS/ERP, CRM, and LMS. 

Your technology platform also needs to provide a central place for students, administrators and staff to communicate, connect, and collaborate on issues that are core to the student experience including: 

🎓 Academics.

🧑‍🎓 Student Organizations & Clubs.

🎟️ Social Activities. 

😊 Leadership & Personal Development.

🏥 Health & Well-being.

🏃🏿 Athletics.

💼 Career Opportunities.

🛏️ Housing.

💸 Finance. 

To succeed, your technology platform must also be easy for users to use, have a social community component that keeps students coming back, and offer strong vendor support. 

When a platform lacks one of these key components, it will fail to be successful.

If your current platform is missing any of these elements, upgrading it can help you improve results on your campus and for your students. Here are the top reasons why our customers have chosen to upgrade to our student experience platform:

 

Cardboard Box_Unified Campus Portal

Top 3 Reasons Customers Upgrade an Existing System

Reason #1Limited Community Engagement Features.

One of the top reasons clients decide to switch systems is that their current solution lacks the breadth of features a Community Platform needs to engage students. 

Many Ready Education clients have told us that their legacy system focused on one thing, such as event tracking, but lacked other features that are central to creating true community engagement, such as a centralized events calendar, campus-wide discussion feed, chat and directory, complete with a list of student clubs and organizations. 

Because these platforms had limited community engagement features, institutions saw low platform adoption by students and staff. In some instances, the result was complete system abandonment, making the investment a loss for the school, and a clear sign that finding a new system provider was necessary.

Ready Education Customer:

SARA E. THOMMESEN, Senior Coordinator of Engagement, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

“Our legacy platform was strictly an events app. It did not have features that are key to a community engagement platform...Mobile functionality was also extremely limited, which meant that students didn’t use it all that much.”

pencil sharpener_Reasons to Upgrade Your Student Experience Platform

Reason #2Lack of Automation.

Another key reason clients decide to upgrade their system is that their current solution lacks automation from a process and analytical standpoint.

Event tracking and student organization registration were pain points for many of the customers who switched from a previous platform to a Ready Education solution. While many campus apps and software systems claim to automate such processes, often the level of automation available through the platform is limited or is unreliable, resulting in client frustration and manual tracking processes and record keeping. 

In addition to being inefficient, a lack of automation often results in missing data. Paper trails and system silos often lead to inaccurate student engagement metrics. The absence of reliable and complete data makes it difficult for higher education institutions to measure student success and develop student engagement strategies.

Ready Education Customer:

CALVIN L. SMITH, JR., Sr. Director, Leadership Engagement & Experiential Development Johns Hopkins University.

“Previously, each of our 9 campuses had its own separate instance of the same student involvement platform. This lack of system integration and automation meant that pulling university-wide stats was very difficult and time consuming.”

Flat tire_Reasons to Upgrade Your Student Experience Platform

Reason #3 Poor Performance & Customer Support.

Poor system performance and customer support is also a common grievance among customers who have decided to switch from another platform to Ready Education. A significant number of clients said they often endured very slow system response time with their legacy platform, where the system would regularly just freeze. This contributed to inefficiencies and weak system adoption. 

In addition, customers say their grievances were often unanswered by the system provider’s customer support team, creating unhappiness and frustration.

At Ready Education, we know how important it is to have a true partner in student success. That’s why we have an entire team dedicated to ensuring our customers have the support they need to succeed. 

As a Ready Education customer, you have: 

🧑 Dedicated Campus Success Consultant and Implementation Manager.

🖥️ Onsite or virtual training support for admins and students.

👥 Active User Community and expansive network of peer institutions.

Ready Education Customer:

SARA E. THOMMESEN, Senior Coordinator of Engagement, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

“The customer experience with our previous provider was poor. Performance was a big issue. Sometimes administrators couldn’t physically get their work done in the system due to the lag time, let alone do it efficiently. Further, when these issues were raised for assistance, technical help and support [from the provider] was also very slow in their response time.”

Reasons to Choose Ready Education

At Ready Education, Student Success is our top core value. Our mission is to empower higher education institutions worldwide to improve the student experience. The benefits of our solutions include:

Unified campus portal_mobile app solutions

Reason #1Unified Campus Portal.

Ready Education's Comprehensive platform serves as the go-to resource on campus. Available on mobile and desktop, it provides students with all the academic, co-curricular, and administrative resources they need to be successful. It also provides a private and secure space for students to build meaningful relationships.

According to our Campus Partners, they chose to implement Ready as their student experience platform because it includes the following key features in a unified portal:

♾️ Integrations with other campus systems (i.e. LMS, SIS, and payment gateways).

🕸️ Campus-wide and topic-based Discussion Feeds.

❗ Just-in-Time Push Notifications.

🎟️ Centralized Events Management system.

👥 Groups & Membership Management system, including Budgeting and Finance.

✅ Dynamic Forms, Workflows and Approval processes.

📧 Email Marketing, with the ability to create templates and track click and open rates.

💬 Group or one-on-one Chat options.

👤 Campus-wide Directory.

📱 Native Campus Mobile app.

🕹️ Gamification, including a custom point system, badging and leaderboard.

Adopting a true enterprise solution that creates a single, go-to place for all student needs also means your institution can sunset disparate systems, resulting in cost savings for your institution at large.

Ready Education Customer:

MARLENE TOBIAS, Principal Administrative Officer, University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

Foster Engagement- "The app has proven its value for our students, but also for our organization. Students love using the app and because of our 95% adoption rate, we are able to support almost all of our students through one single platform."

Student Experience Pltaform_Multiple Engagement tools

Reason #2Multiple Engagement Tools.  

Ready Education’s student experience platform offers multiple ways to communicate and engage. The student groups and membership feature, events management tools, discussion feeds and chat are among the most popular engagement features. 

These tools help students make meaningful connections, stay connected to campus life and create a sense of belonging. We are proud that our solutions are used by over 7 million students and have been shown to increase retention by up to 4%.

As we work with each of our partners, we continue to enhance existing features and build new ones. Our goal is always to provide the best-in-class solutions to drive the highest level of engagement for the largest number of students. 

Ready Education Customer:

MATT WEITZEL, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, IT Project Manager.

Shared Experience -  "Prior to implementing Ready, our online community had a very different student experience to the on-campus population. Creating a shared experience for all students...helped level the playing field."

Workflow and robust tracking features

 

Reason #3Automated Workflows and Robust Tracking and Reporting.

Reliable workflows and metrics are key to measuring student success. This is why our portal has automated key processes, including event registration and check-in. Push notifications and dynamic workflows are also key communication tools that help keep students engaged.

All data feeds into an analytics and reporting dashboard in real time. This enables administrators to track engagement via a leaderboard and gamification features. 

It also enables staff to intervene before students become at-risk and address the issues that lead to student disengagement and other behaviors that result in dropouts. 

Ready Education Customer:

FRANCES FIELD, Student Engagement Specialist, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

Transformational Data- “We chose CampusGroups [a Ready solution] because it enabled us to automate key processes. Students especially like that data is tracked live, enabling them to track their process status in real time.”

We Hear You banner_3 Reasons to Upgrade Your Student Experience Platform

How We Can Help Enhance the Student Experience on Your Campus

Curious about how Ready Education can help you improve student engagement and increase retention on your campus? We’d love to speak with you! Contact us to learn more about upgrading your campus community platform by completing the form here.