New Unibuddy Updates Help You Know Higher Ed Students Inside Out

Last year over 1.5M students made connections over the Unibuddy Platform. Last year we helped universities boost enrollment numbers to new highs. Last year we added Unibuddy Community – our answer to helping bolster student confidence at every step in their higher ed journey. 

Our only issue? This was last year. 

At Unibuddy, we inject innovative future-forward thinking into everything we do. And this year is no different. We’re integrating AI with Unibuddy Chat. We’re introducing new reporting features to help you slice and dice your funnel. We’re making it easier for your student ambassadors to submit content. At a time when budgets are tight and teams are stretched, we can help your team know your students inside out – so you can better attract, convert, and retain them.

Better conversation insights tailored to higher ed 

We’re not trying to emulate or replace your offline conversations, we’re trying to enhance your online presence – for more authentic personalization. As such, we’ve added a bunch of ways to tailor digital communications by leveraging student-to-student conversations. Led by cutting-edge AI integration, these solutions allow you to gain instant insight into who your students are and what matters to them without adding additional time-consuming work. 

As something we’re particularly excited about, our new conversation summaries feature employs the power of OpenAI’s GPT “Large Language Model” AI to provide short summaries of what’s important to each of your prospective students. By combing through available conversational data, this initial AI integration, which is only the beginning of what we have planned, provides you with primary salient points conveniently packaged in one to three sentences. This enables you to understand what a student wants instantaneously at the click of a mouse, as opposed to trawling through masses of data. 

“This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you can do with GPT data,” says David Higginson, Unibuddy’s Product Lead. “Imagine what else can be done with all this conversational data. It’s limitless. Turning your conversations into data? That’s real ROI. Stay tuned!”

And the best part? We’ve made all student summaries easy to integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) solution – from Slate to Salesforce and beyond. While the immediate effect of this is to help make this information available at any time, this integration ensures you can maintain single unified student profiles across the board.

In tandem with this AI infusion, Unibuddy now provides sample questions of what prospective students are asking. These data-backed questions are gathered from student inquiries driving your trending topics. In addition to helping you make your student interactions more relevant, this feature can help you and your team save the time of gathering all this info yourselves – turning a task that normally could take hours into seconds. 

To help your team understand the decision-making process further, we’ve also added a new section of your dashboard that surfaces detailed insights into individual student decision preferences. This helps your team understand more about what specifically motivates students to choose your school, what excites them about studying with you, and what they need to feel more confident about their choice to attend your higher ed institution. Further conversation management tools highlight when and which conversations need attention. These additional enhancements enable your team to further tailor messaging to find your best-fit students and provide personalized support to prospective students.

More actionable data for more visibility on student audiences

Data is at the heart of every higher ed solution. But, while other solutions simply propose more data, we take the approach that you also need configurable data. In other words: You need higher ed data which isn’t just data for the sake of being data. 

That’s why we’ve introduced new features in Unibuddy Chat that help you drill down on the data that’s important. No more spending hours analyzing every data point – we’ve got you covered. 

Particular consideration is being given to our reports and visualizations. While our existing methods for showing higher ed data are effective, we acknowledge that they are not always in the same place. As such, our new data features allow you to see all your student data in one location.

We’ve also added a new funnel snapshot feature which provides a real-time view of where each prospective student is in your higher ed funnel. Based on self-reported data, complete with new filters designed to easily slice student data, this feature can help inform next actions in your recruitment, admissions, and enrollment processes. New confidence scores have been added to subsequently inform how positive students feel about choosing your school and what they need to move forward with a confident choice.

“Basically anything you can imagine that helps tell the story of that data can now be accessed more easily through filters,” says Higginson. “The big win here is that you can not only view all the conversations happening on your platform, but also slice, dice and drill down into this data.”

All Unibuddy data collection tools are created with privacy in mind and are compliant with various privacy laws – including the EU’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR).  

Easy and efficient tools for more engaging student experiences

From enabling student-to-student connections to fostering authentic communities of belonging, positive student journeys are at the heart of everything we do at Unibuddy. But, while Unibuddy Chat provides the tools, we also need to ensure you can encourage student engagement with your higher ed brand. 

With our student invite feature, you can connect prospects in your pipeline to student ambassadors. This enables your team to capture deeper student insights and to learn more about them –  ensuring your lead generation investments don’t go to waste.

At the click of a button, you can send batch invites to specific groups of students in your higher ed funnel to join Unibuddy. As the authentic voices of your higher ed brand, student ambassadors provide the most-effective way to engage with your Gen Z audience – an audience of whom 92% say just connecting with a current student can help them reach a decision.  

Content-side, we’ve made it easier for students to create and interact with your content. Our new content experience tools streamline the process for student ambassadors to create original content for your school – complete with a new streamlined review and feedback process. On the front end, we’ve added visibility features to improve how prospective students discover and interact with your content. 

“We redesigned the content viewing experience to match what students expect in terms of user experience,” says Higginson. “There’s room for lots more images, video, and the ability to scroll through galleries of images. We also improved the filtering and search experience to match what you’d expect when you’re browsing content elsewhere on the web.”

To learn more about these Unibuddy updates, contact your Unibuddy representative or book a demo.