University of Kentucky Sees 80% of Surveyed Students Say Unibuddy Directly Influenced Their Decision to Enroll

Challenge 

Before Unibuddy, University of Kentucky’s international enrollment team connected prospective students to current student ambassadors through a simple webpage that listed ambassadors’ email addresses. Every conversation happened off-platform, with no way to track engagement or measure whether the exchanges were actually leading anywhere.

“The only way we’d know a conversation was happening is if we told students to copy one of us in,” said Landon Segress, Assistant Director, International Enrollment Management at University of Kentucky. “It was more of a guessing game than anything. We knew conversations were happening, but not always the quality of the conversations.”

With just a small international enrollment team supporting a growing roster of student ambassadors, the manual process quickly became unsustainable. “We knew there was a gap to fill, and that there must be a better solution, because our manual approach just wasn’t scalable for our needs,” said Landon.

Solution

University of Kentucky has used Unibuddy Chat for six years, giving prospective students a single, centralized place on the university’s website to connect directly with current international student ambassadors.

“As far as ease of use, and being able to monitor all of our student ambassadors and their conversations, that was immediate,” said Landon. The team leans heavily on Keyword and Chat Summary Insights to see what prospective students are actually asking about at a glance, from scholarships to specific academic programs, and uses Saved Answers to help ambassadors answer frequently asked questions quickly and consistently. Profile filtering by country and program has also proven especially valuable for reaching students in regions where the university has no in-person presence.

Hundreds of conversations happen on the platform each cycle, and for Landon, that volume alone is meaningful. “That in and of itself shows that prospective students are engaging with our current student ambassadors,” said Landon. “And for some, it’s helping push them through to actually complete their application.”

Impact

80% of surveyed students said Unibuddy directly influenced their decision to enroll at University of Kentucky. Where the team once had no visibility into ambassador activity or student engagement, Unibuddy now gives them a single platform to see what’s happening at a glance, from which countries are most engaged to how students move from conversation to application to enrollment.

“It was such a black hole before,” said Landon. “Being able to see all of that on the dashboard, and cross-check with our own data, it’s very quick and easy now. That certainly wasn’t the case before.”

For a small international team, simply being able to highlight ambassadors by home country has become one of the platform’s most valuable functions. Landon points to Costa Rica as an example: a small applicant pool concentrated mostly around San Jose, where prospective students browsing the page will often recognize an ambassador from their own city or school circle, and reach out because of that connection.

“They see people from their home countries, and it gives them someone real to reach out to,” said Landon. “It’s just an area of access that truly didn’t exist before. Being able to see someone from your own country already there, thriving, on our campus, and actually being able to talk to them, makes a real difference.”