Conversation Insights: Powerful Data From Your Student Chats

Today, we’re launching a powerful new Conversation Insights tool on the Unibuddy dashboard.

It’s well established that Generation Z wants content that is tailored, engaging, cost-effective and smart. It’s another challenge altogether to actually do it. 

That’s where data comes in, to underpin the student journey and inform marketing. But much of the data being used today is flawed: based on surveys and focus groups plagued with methodological problems. At Unibuddy, we wanted to use our peer-to-peer chat platform to generate a more authentic insight.

The messages exchanged on the Unibuddy platform provide a rich dataset and, crucially, that authentic insight. Drawn from natural conversations, these messages reveal what’s really going through prospects’ minds.

Powerful, Machine Learning technology

Now, we’re giving our partners access to the powerful Machine Learning technology that allows them to analyse the conversations that are happening on their Unibuddy platform. 

With the new Conversation Insights tool, you can filter and view the most frequent topics by course of interest and country of origin, and view data for a range of time periods.

We’ve released plenty of data about the topics of the over 2 million messages exchanged on Unibuddy – and now we’re giving you the ability to dive into that data yourself. You’ll see which students want to know about money, and which are more concerned with social life. You can use the data to target and tailor your messaging in a more personal way than ever before. 

These insights are for more than just marketing teams. Understanding what your students really want should underpin the entire university experience and all decision making: from the curriculum to the facilities. These conversation insights can inform, not just personalised marketing, but a personalised experience.

What you might find

We’re very excited about this development because it means you can discover for yourself exactly what your students are talking about. But we’ve analyzed thousands of messages exchanged across our platform to gather some insights about all students. 

For example, we’ve found that undergraduate students ask more about the practical side of attending university. They are 40% more likely to talk about social life than postgraduates. 

Postgraduates, meanwhile, are 62% more likely to talk about careers.

Business students are 62% more likely to talk about careers than any other topic. History and philosophy students are 97% more likely to talk about workload – perhaps expressing concerns over the number of essays, or the transition to Higher Education.

These insights as a whole can help determine the messaging you use for your students and the way you craft the student journey. At an institution level, they will be even more powerful.

Unique conversation insights

Now, you can get a unique insight into the authentic concerns of students, based on their natural conversations with student ambassadors. The data will highlight the distinctions that exist between demographics and individuals in their fears, motivations and interests in the transition to Higher Education.

These insights can and should be informing marketing strategies – but it shouldn’t stop there. A better understanding of the student journey, underpinned by data, should inform every aspect of the university experience. From enrolment to beyond graduation.

Students are demanding a personalised experience – and universities should be using authentic data insights to deliver that.

Check out the new feature for yourself using the Insights tab in your dashboard.

Not using Unibuddy? Book a demo now.