If you are working with education agents to recruit international students it is important to understand how each of your agents is performing.
Quantitative assessment is straightforward. You are probably already tracking data on the number of students referred and enrolled by your education agents.
What about qualitative assessment of agent performance? Do you have a clear view of the quality of service that each of your agents is providing to the students they work with?
Qualitative assessment of agent performance is critical to the assessment and effective management of education agent risk, and should be built in to your workflow for student enrollments that come from your education agents.
Consider the decision matrix below, which combines both quantitative and qualitative education agent performance outcomes. It’s the kind of decision making framework you might use when undertaking regular reviews of the performance of each of your education agents (which should also be part of your agent management process).
Let’s take a look at each box, and the action that you might take in response.
Box 1 – Low Quality of Service + Low Enrollment Numbers
Easy decision. Any agents in this box should be cut immediately. They are costing you administrative overhead, and the poor level of service puts your institution’s reputation and prospective students at risk.
Box 2 – Low Quality of Service + High Enrollment Numbers
Less clear cut. This agent is sending plenty of students your way but the service quality should be a cause for concern. The action you take may depend on the nature of the service quality issues and your own assessment of risk.
It may be that the service quality issues can be addressed by your institution providing better support to the agent.
If the service quality issues are serious and ongoing you should seriously consider cutting the agent. Yes, there will be some impact on your international student enrollment numbers and revenue, but the reputational damage and poor student outcomes associated with an agent that is providing bad service to students in your institution’s name is too serious to ignore.
Box 3 – High Quality of Service + Low Enrollment Numbers
Opportunity knocks. These agents are providing good service to students which is an ideal base to work from. There is an opportunity for you here to focus on agents in this box and support them to increase enrollment numbers. The aim should be to support them to move into box 4 over time.
Box 4 – High Quality of Service + High Enrollment Numbers
The engine room of your education agent recruitment channel. Applying the Pareto Principle, these are the 20% of your agents who are collectively responsible for 80% of enrollments through your agent channel. Focus on supporting and incentivising these agents to cement a long term relationship.
How do you do qualitative assessment of education agent performance?
You should do qualitative assess of the performance of each of your edcuation agents:
- before entering into an agency agreement or contract – i.e. initial due diligence, and
- regularly over the life of your agreement with the agent – i.e. ongoing due diligience.
Initial due diligence
Traditionally initial due diligence is done by seeking references from other educational institutions that the agent represents. You can now also use the Agent Check solution from AgentBee, which enables you to run background checks on education agents. The database that underpins the Agent Check solution contains hundreds of business intelligence reports on education agents – including information on performance, and incidents of alleged and actual misconduct – dating back to 2000.
Ongoing due diligence
The best, and simplest, way to do ongoing due diligence is to seek feedback on agent performance from each one of your enrolled students who was referred by an education agent.
AgentBee’s end-to-end education agent management solution now includes an ongoing due diligence tool, making it easy for you to seek feedback on agent performance from your students. Simply send the student a unique link (which we’ll give you) and they will see a form like the one below.
Once the student completes the form the results are available immediately in your institution’s secure portal on the AgentBee platform.
Use the agent feedback form as part of AgentBee’s end-to-end education agent management solution, or as a stand-alone tool to support your current education agent management processes.
Start doing ongoing education agent due diligence
Contact us for more info on how to seek student feedback on education agent performance as part of a best practice approach to education agent management.
