What the Frictionless Student Experience Looks Like in Higher Education

 

What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Frictionless’ Student Experience?

Millions of high school students around the nation are, to some degree, preparing right now for the rest of their lives. Some will end their educational careers at high school graduation, but many — including some who ultimately won’t commit — are contemplating a post-secondary education. That means researching universities that may be a good fit, working with school guidance counselors and (significantly, for our purposes) taking campus visits, either in-person or virtually.

When those students and their families have concluded their research and are ready to decide what college to attend — an increasingly important moment for universities as the number of domestic high school seniors will plunge with the impending enrollment cliff — there will be many factors they consider. Cost matters a lot. So does the quality of the education they receive, the types of programs a school offers, the facilities available on campus and untold other things that depend on students and their interests.

Ideally, higher education institutions want prospective students to walk away from a tour practically floating with excitement. It’s the most effective, direct sales pitch universities deliver, and one that, again, deserves some extra focus right now with increased competition for enrollees.

But what if, during that sales pitch, nothing works the way students or their families expect it to? What if the Wi-Fi is spotty? What if they can’t figure out how to navigate your school’s clunky app? What if they must log in 15 different places to do 15 different things? As anyone who’s ever experienced those annoyances can attest, wanting to throw your phone at the wall out of frustration is going to sour your sales pitch, no matter how many brilliant alums your university has produced, how shiny your esports arena is and how much kids love the renovated residence halls. There’s a negative feeling that’s going to linger all the way to decision day, one that’s going to be felt by parents and students alike.

KEEP READING: Drive your university forward through legacy application modernization.

Friction, of course, slows things down, and enough friction stops them entirely. On the internet — and on your university’s network — slow shouldn’t be part of the vocabulary.

The frictionless experience means ubiquitous connectivity out to the farthest reaches of campus, single sign-on solutions that minimize password annoyances, easy app navigation and the consolidation of services in a single spot.

If a student wants to find out what’s for dinner, pay their tuition, contact the campus support team and access the learning management system, that ideally would be done all in the same place, because that’s what students and their parents are used to in other areas of their life. Their banking app doesn’t make them switch from one spot to another to pay the mortgage, check their account balance and update their address. And their smart TV doesn’t restart every time they switch between streaming platforms, lest that remote thrown in frustration be directed at the TV screen.

If a student can return from your campus and think nothing about their connectivity or how they interacted digitally with the university, you’ve probably delivered a frictionless experience. Because in other areas of life — including in the K–12 schools they’re soon to graduate from — a frictionless experience is the expectation. Too often, though, students and their families come home from those campus visits wondering why the university they’re paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend seems to be stuck in the dark ages technologically speaking.

What’s Causing the Digital Friction in Higher Education?

There are a handful of easy-to-guess reasons why colleges may not be providing the digital experience their students expect. Many of those reasons involve connectivity challenges brought on by budget crunches and technology decentralization, something that’s common on college campuses.

RELATED: What’s preventing universities from improving the student digital experience?

Decentralization is part of a larger debate. But it becomes a problem for the student experience when, say, the college of business is using Google Workspace for Education, the post-graduate researchers are committed to Microsoft products and the bursar’s office is using a proprietary payment tracker developed in-house 15 years ago by an IT person who no longer works for the university.

It’s not hard to see how that arrangement could create a lot of friction, but there’s a surprising piece of the puzzle that those challenges don’t account for: personnel.

People Make the Frictionless Digital World Come Alive

Higher education is also undergoing a staffing crunch, including in IT, where colleges have long been unable to match the salaries offered by private business. That gap may only expand with companies binging on artificial intelligence-related hires and universities relying on legacy tools and systems that frustrate IT staff to no end.

There are valid reasons, though, why legacy tools often dominate in higher education, none more so than that upgrading is expensive, time-consuming and sometimes adds tools that no one on your team has ever used before. Student lifecycle management solutions through platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow and Freshworks are extremely popular right now, but success with those types of platforms also requires trained IT staff members who know them inside and out. If your university isn’t already using something like that, it’s unlikely anyone on the IT team is prepared to integrate it.

WATCH: How Utah State University leveraged ServiceNow to improve efficiency.

That’s where training and temporary staff augmentation can make a huge difference. If all the attention on enrollment and the student experience finally motivates high-ranking university officials to approve major system upgrades, make sure you don’t make the mistake of leaving your people behind.

Short-staffed IT departments don’t have the time, let alone the expertise, to add new tools to their portfolio. But if workforce development and temporary hires are part of an integration, they can go off smoothly and prove to your IT personnel that the university wants to invest in their success.

We’ve seen universities hire temporary staff to get a platform off the ground and lead training for full-timers before leaving for the next temporary gig. Other schools prefer to build an elastic bench with retainers in place for application modernization professionals, if needed, and scheduled check-ins throughout the implementation. And still others might prefer convert-to-hire temp employees who get a trial run during implementation for the university to assess their potential value.

At CDW, our staff augmentation services give colleges all of those options and more, to help choose, implement and manage the solutions you need to take the student digital experience to a higher level.