Page 14 - Campus Technology, March/April 2018

RETENTION
FASTFACTS Mesa Community College
2 campuses
Fall 2017 enrollment: 20,424
Average student age: 25
Full-time/Part-time enrollment: 31%/69%
training staff over a period of months; more infrastructure would be needed; and a call center didn’t exactly fall into Mesa’s core mission of teaching and learning. The conclusion: “We didn’t have the internal staff to do mass call campaigns — upwards of 40,000 calls over two weeks,” noted Bullock.
Instead, college leaders looked to outside help. The institu- tion and its district, Maricopa Community Colleges, had a long relationship with Blackboard. Blackboard reps, aware of Mesa’s concerns, queried the college: Would there be any interest in partnering on a call campaign to drive student re- engagement? Under the guidance of interim President Sasan Poureetezadi and then-interim Vice President of IT Andrew Giddings, a contract was signed in August 2015. However, cultural concerns and additional planning efforts kept the experiment at bay for another year.
Campaign Briefing
The initial fall 2016 campaign sought to reach two specific groups of students by phone: 1) people who had applied but hadn’t completed the entire application process to the point where they’d registered for courses; and 2) students who had attended “a semester or two ago” but hadn’t re-enrolled. Call- ing these individuals provides an opportunity “to touch base with the student and to ask them why they didn’t re-enroll or why they’re not interested in returning to Mesa,” said Bullock.
The largest response from those who chose not to come
back to Mesa tended to be the one the college actually wanted to hear: The student had transferred to a four-year school or met all of his or her educational goals by attaining a credential or associate’s degree. But others responded that a new job got in the way or they had transportation problems.
Those responses “bring up additional opportunities,” Bull- ock noted. “Maybe there’s something we can do there — work with the city to get free bus passes or something else.”
To kick off the initial calling campaign, Bullock worked with Carmen Prado Newland, dean of enrollment services, to develop a calling script. That included screenshots so the Blackboard call agents would see exactly what a student would see if he or she were sent online. And after a few days of testing, it underwent a bit of revision.
Blackboard’s reps would serve as a tier-one level of out- reach. Outfitted with data pulled from Mesa’s student infor- mation system, the agent could begin the call with a person- alized opening: for instance, “I see you haven’t completed
your testing...” or “I see you need to come in and do your ID authentication for in-state residency; you can take a photo of that and submit it through this link if you’d like....”
The script also included rerouting information. “We have a financial aid hotline at the district,” said Bullock, “so we informed the agents that if the student had that kind of ques- tion, they could either direct them to the FAFSA website or route them to another line that we use for financial aid sup- port.” While financial aid was at the top of the list of student problems, other typical questions would involve overrides on courses or questions about credit transfers from other schools.
When the agents couldn’t handle a question, they’d do a real-time call forward back to college staff in Prado New- land’s student services center. Bullock said the college made around 10 student services specialists available dur- ing each calling campaign to handle those transfer calls.
If it was after-hours or on weekends or the student couldn’t talk at that moment, the agents would ask if the student want- ed a call back; then Mesa personnel would return the call within 48 hours, during college business hours.
Each call was documented for tracking purposes, and Blackboard provided an Excel spreadsheet to the college every morning at 6 a.m. By cross-referencing that informa- tion with Mesa’s student information system, internal staff were able to understand the nature of each call and directly respond without the student having to repeat the story.4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2018