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The best tertiary institutions in the world have one thing in common: they deliver an amazing experience for their students.
Students fortunate enough to attend these institutions receive world-class tuition, access leading facilities and resources, receive timely support from critical services, and make personal connections that endure for life.
These students are forever indebted for the memorable and transformational experiences they gained as a student. Not surprisingly, the reputational and financial gains for the institution are enormous.
Of course, the delivery of such an experience is not by chance. It follows from a tertiary institution’s resolute focus on crafting a finely-tuned experience for their students. For these institutions what sits at the heart of a student’s day-to-day experience is a well-articulated and distinctive student experience strategy.
And so if the strategy is key, what steps must an institution take to deliver a good one?
We detail below the elements critical to crafting a world-class student experience strategy. Getting this strategy right will help your institution to deliver a scalable and distinctive student experience that will benefit not only your students but also your institution.
The first step in developing a student experience strategy is to identify the objectives that you want to achieve. In short, what are you solving for?
For example, you might want to increase student completion rates, improve student satisfaction, or enhance the employability of your graduates.
Having clarity not only creates a “north star” for your efforts but will be the first step in beginning to craft a distinctive experience for your students.
Importantly, these objectives should be measurable such that you can track performance over time.
A student experience strategy can be defined as a plan of action that an institution takes to enhance the overall experience of its students during their time at that institution.
It can be a pillar of a wider strategic plan, or it can be a standalone strategy that sits below your institution’s strategic plan.
Those institutions who deliver the world’s best student experiences have student experience either baked into their overall strategic plan, or have a distinct student experience strategy that sits beneath their strategic plan.
Be clear upfront on what the end product will look like. It must be high level enough to be broadly applicable - likely as a series of principles - but it must also have a level of detail to make it distinctive and meaningful.
This also means being clear on the audience. While your student experience strategy will serve a corporate function, it will likely end up on your website and will be viewed by students. Be prepared to develop an end product that will be as accessible to your current (and future) students as it is for your staff. They will assess you on this!
To create an enriching student experience, it is essential to involve students in the development of your strategy and to truly understand their needs.
This can be done through focus groups, surveys, and feedback tools. This will help you gain insight into the needs and wants of your students and tailor your strategy accordingly.
In addition, it is essential to understand the demographics of your students to tailor your strategy to their needs. This involves collecting and analyzing data on factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and academic background.
Psychographics, which include why and what students chose to study and the motivation behind it, are also critical to understand. This will help you understand the challenges that your students face and the areas where they require support.
You will need to be open to students having different views on what makes a great student experience. You must be comfortable with divergent views and have an approach that caters for these differences.
It is easy for a strategy to live on paper or in PowerPoint presentations. It is much more difficult for a strategy to be lived through daily interactions and decisions.
The best way to help a student experience strategy to live (and survive) is to involve all parts of your tertiary institution in the creation and delivery of your strategy.
This begins with communicating the process of strategy creation and seeking the right input from different parts of the institution. It also means testing early iterations of the strategy and seeking feedback for refinement.
Once the strategy is complete, take constituent parts of your institution through the final product and work with them to understand how they can support it and measure success against it.
As you are developing your student experience strategy, continue to ask yourself: what makes this distinct?
Many of your competitors will be developing a student experience strategy also, and so it will be imperative that yours is distinctive and attractive in the market. Many strategies in the market read the same to prospective students - and so here is an opportunity for you to stand out.
To test this, you might review the student experience strategy of your competitors if it is publicly available.
You might also seek a distinctive way to communicate it, such as a video on your corporate page (rather than a long document) or through social media.
It will take time to craft a world-class student experience strategy.
Do give yourself that time, but be aware that it is an iterative process. Start with your best hypothesis and evolve from there.
And at some point you will need to wrap the process up, so be comfortable that it is a document that evolves over time in accordance with the institution’s (and your students’) needs.
Finally, it is essential to evaluate and refine your student experience strategy regularly. This involves collecting data on the impact of your strategy and using it to make informed decisions about future developments. This will help you to continuously improve the student experience and achieve your objectives.