By: Robert Heil, CEO

Students expect a combination of personalization with the speed that they experience from Amazon or DoorDash.  Without that speed, students are less likely to stay engaged with you, and less engagement leads to recruitment and retention challenges.  This can be especially challenging for financial aid and student accounts offices where speed + quality + accuracy must be delivered at scale.

Whether it be wait times, responding to their initial inquiry, offering admission first, or processing aid faster and sending an offer notice first–students reward speed.

If students love speed, what does speed love? Efficiency.

Providing a more efficient enrollment experience for students and parents must be a critical element in your comprehensive enrollment management strategy.  No amount of marketing can offset an inefficient process.  This is the pitfall too many campuses fall in.  You can spend (or waste) hundreds of thousands of dollars on enrollment marketing, yet your greatest competitive advantage may be uncovering the efficiency and organizational capability needed to deliver customization and speed at scale.

You may not consider your financial aid and student accounts offices as major brand influencers, but you should.  Mistakes and complications damage your brand.  Your brand is not driven by US News & World Report rankings.  Your brand is shaped by the student experience you deliver.  When students and parents receive a streamlined, accurate experience, you strengthen your brand every time.

Websites that do not load in less than 6 seconds are usually abandoned.  In the same vein, dissatisfied students will go elsewhere.  Outside of academics, no other two offices on campus shape the student experience more than the financial aid and student accounts offices.  Do your strategic investments in recruitment and retention reflect that?

Without speed + accuracy + quality, you are operating at a disadvantage. 

Here are two ways we are helping our clients:

At FAS, we’ve spent 32 years mastering a model connecting the best people, processes, and systems to help our clients gain a competitive advantage.  Our Outsourced Processing service combines our consultants, analysts, industry-leading practices, lean process methodology, and meticulous quality controls.  These coupled with our technology platform provides the speed, accuracy, and quality your students expect.  Using this service, your financial aid office can process aid exponentially faster with accuracy giving you a major competitive advantage with recruitment and retention.

Want to know where you stand?  Our Organizational Capability Reviews for financial aid and student accounts offices can measure your business processes against best practices to discover where the major efficiency gains can be found. How well are you optimizing technology?  How do your staffing levels stack up against benchmarks from peer institutions?  Where can you improve the student experience?  Don’t think of it as an audit.  The goal is not to point out mistakes.  The purpose is to find opportunities.  We are “peer educators”.  Our consultants come alongside to teach, coach, and roll up their sleeves to help.

To learn more, contact FAS to uncover how you can strengthen your financial operations, optimize enrollment, and enhance the student experience.