Halloween is almost upon us (cue creaking door sound and spooky music). It’s a time for ghoulish reflection on important questions like, “are ghosts real?”, and “what will I do in the event of a zombie apocalypse?”.

What about zombie education agents? What’s your plan to deal with them?

Zombie education agents aren’t real…

…or are they? Mwwahahahaha…sorry.

If your educational institution has been working with education agents for a while it’s likely that you’ll have some zombie education agents lurking about.

Zombie education agents are the agents that express keen interest in representing your institution, but once the agency contract is in place nothing happens. No students referred, no enrollments, and no meaningful response to your regular agent outreach.

Just like the zombies in the last Netflix zombie series you watched, the zombie education agents on your list will suck the life out of you.

If you have best practice education agent management policies and systems in place, every agent you work with carries a significant administrative burden. Irrespective of the number of students they refer to you, you have to:

  • communicate with the agent regularly
  • train them on your institution and courses
  • ensure they have your latest marketing material, and
  • monitor their performance.

You simply can’t justify that administrative overhead for an education agent that is not producing for you.

To be blunt – zombie education agents must be dealt with. On TV, dealing with zombies is typically unpleasant. It usually involves a band of heavily armed oddball survivors enthusiastically reducing the zombie population in the most horribly gory way possible.

Unleashing the fury on your own zombie education agents won’t be quite so dramatic. It’s simply a matter of identifying those agents that are not meeting your targets and standards and ending your contract with them.

It is critical that you do this regularly because you don’t want large numbers of zombie education agents gathering on your list. As we know from Netflix, one or two zombies can usually be dispatched without too much trouble, but if you find yourself facing a horde of them it is probably not going to end well.

AgentBee vs. Zombie Education Agents

AgentBee helps educational institutions to implement an effective, efficient and best practice education agent strategy to support international student recruitment.

Our solution has three elements…

Grow your education agent network

Identify and on-board new education agents in your target markets.

Manage your education agents

Manage the ongoing, day-to-day relationship with your agents to implement best practice agent management and increase international student enrollments.

Protect against agent risk

Use our Agent Check tool to:

  • run background checks on new and current agents
  • get alerts on new business intelligence reports about agents each time we add one, and
  • get feedback from enrolled students on the agent they worked with.

AgentBee is flexible. Use it how you want to…

You can:

  • use all elements of the solution together as a fully integrated agent recruitment and management solution, or 
  • select just those elements that you need to support your current approach.

Interested?

Find out how to implement a successful education agent strategy with AgentBee.