Active management of your education agent network is critical if you want your education agent channel to be a strong source of international student enrollments.
A dedicated education agent portal is perhaps the best way to support engagement and cooperation between you and your agents. Of course the aim is to recruit more international students for your institution.
Education Agent Portal – Feature Checklist
There are 10 key features that your education agent portal should have in order to support efficient and effective management of your education agent channel.
If you already have an education portal, does it tick all of the boxes below?
If you are thinking of adopting a dedicated education agent portal for your institution, you can use the list below as a ‘minimum requirements’ checklist when assessing potential solutions.
1. Best Practice Education Agent Management
First and foremost your education agent portal should support your institution to implement a ‘best practice’ approach to education agent management. This will ensure the best outcomes for your institution, your agent, and most importantly, students.
What does best practice education agent management mean? We’ve posted on the issue quite a bit in the past, so we won’t go over it again here, but definitely check out our previous posts if you want to explore this issue further.
2. Secure Access
The portal should be accessible only by you and your authorised agents through a secure login page.
This means you can ensure that it is only your authorised agents who can access the information, updates and documents you post. Some of this information may be commercially sensitive so you don’t necessarily want others seeing it.
3. Updates
Your education agent portal should make it super easy to post quick, regular updates for your agents. By posting regular updates you can ensure that your agents have the latest information about your institution, and also ensure that your institution stays top of mind with your agents.
4. Key Documents
Your education agent portal should have a dedicated space or folder where you can upload the key documents that are relevant to your agents. This could include, for example:
- marketing material, and
- enrollment process documents.
This will make it easy for your agents to access the latest versions of your key documents whenever they need them.
5. Communication
Your education agent portal should make it easy to:
- communicate with your agents as a group, and
- communicate one-on-one with your agents.
In both cases you should be able to communicate entirely within the portal without having to use a separate email tool.
6. Student Enrollment Management
Most educational institutions now have some form of online process in place for accepting and processing student applications.
That’s great when you are working with students directly, but often those systems do not have the required features or flexibility to enable you to work effectively with your agents on the students they refer to you.
Your education agent portal should make it super easy for:
- agents to submit student applications to your institution
- you to to cooperate with the referring agent to move the student through the enrollment process, and
- you and the agent to quickly check the status of a student by seeing in real-time where the application is up to in the process.
7. Commission Payments
It is important that you pay your agents promptly following each successful enrollment. Your agent portal should enable you to manage the invoicing and payment process efficiently.
8. Automatic Notifications
This applies to points 1-6 above. Whenever you do anything in your portal – post an update, upload a document, make a comment on a referred student, or move a student to the next stage of the enrollment process, an automatic notification should be triggered. This saves you a heap of admin time having to mess around with separate update emails to your agents.
9. Education Agent Recruitment
Your education agent network will be most productive when kept under regular review. You should prune it reguarly to remove unproductive agents.
To put it another way, a healthy and productive education agent network is dynamic, not static. Sure, you’ll have a core of really solid agent partners who produce great results for you year on year, and you should focus on keeping them engaged and happy. Those that are not working out should go.
If you are regularly removing agents who are not working out, you will need a way to refresh your network with new agents. Your education agent portal should support you to identify and on-board new education agents in your target markets, and to manage the contracts you have in place with your agents.
10. Education Agent Contract Management
A key element of best practice education agent management is that your institution should have a formal agreement or contract in place with each agent that is authorised to represent you. If you are doing that, you need a way to keep track of those legal documents.
Your education agent portal should enable you to easily keep track of your authorised agents, store the associated agency contract, and set a due date for contract review and renewal.
AgentBee’s Education Agent Portal Solution
AgentBee offers a complete education agent management solution that supports educational institutions to grow and manage their agent network effectively to increase international student enrollments.
We use a success based pricing model, so you only pay when it works.