Three missed call benchmarks for online universities: Are you missing out?

For a prospective student, calling up a potential university is a big step. It usually comes after deep chats about life goals, a long period of research, and a lot of personal reflection. Maybe they want to apply, maybe they have questions, maybe they want reassurance. Whatever the reason, when they pick up the phone they’re ready to invest in changing their life.

But you miss the call.

Not a great start, is it?

Closing the gap

Just as important as finding out what is working is finding out where you’re losing opportunities. You don’t want to spend budget reaching people only to miss out when they try to contact you.

Ideally, you want to miss none of these calls, but an improvement is a start. What is a good, achievable target to aim for? This is what one of our online university clients asked for our opinion on, so we looked at over 200,000 calls to a mix of online universities over the last year to give them some answers.

These were a few of our findings that we thought we’d share with you.

January Blues

The month when online universities miss the most calls is January, with over 5% being unanswered. Beating this number needs to be your first target for the new year.

Calls out for Summer

Most online universities see their call numbers peak in August, with September and October also having high amounts. It’s not surprise that these months see the best answering rates, as only 1.77% are missed in August. A good figure, but definitely beatable.

Are you ready to answer the call?

The overall missed calls benchmark for online universities to beat

Okay, so those are some time-specific targets to beat. But what about the year as a whole? Looking at all 12 months combined, online universities focusing on phone calls miss an average of 2.79% of calls overall.

What’s 2.79% of your total call volume? If the average online university degree costs $30,000, how much could missing those calls be costing your university? Monitoring and minimizing this metric is a vital ongoing activity for every online university. Start a conversation with us today to see how you can do this, your potential students are counting on you to be there for them.

Where are online university application calls coming from?

Reducing your missed calls is vital, but getting a steady stream of eager students is also critical for a thriving university. Knowing what is encouraging people to pick up the phone is an exercise in attribution that will see you reap rewards for years.

Download our 5-point attribution plan for online universities today.

If you’d like to learn more about a university already tackling these challenges head-on, read our case study with Saint Leo University. They have already reduced their missed calls by 26% despite their call volume increasing, while also delivering 113% more quality calls to application numbers via PPC.