We can do virtually anything...

The onslaught of our busy January continues... Therefore, I'm just snatching five minutes to update this blog with details of a new project which we supported last week.

"Our operators are standing by..."

Before Christmas, our Postgraduate Marketing team came up with the idea of running two Virtual Open Days for prospective students. This would involve them logging on to our website at specified times and then taking part in a selection of activities/virtual tours - and this is where we came in! We offered up some initial ideas of how we could support this, both in the lead up and on the days. To begin, we went about building a landing page for all attendees which gave answers to all of the basic questions we expected them to ask.

We then recommeded that we make use of our current live text chat service but take it to the next level by enlisting the expertise of our academics. This took a lot of organising - particularly from the PG team who had to ensure that each hour of the event was covered by a member of staff from each subject. Our job was to install the software and train over 30 staff in the space of a week! Thankfully, we have a great service which we currently use called ISL Pronto which has no limit on the amount of user accounts we can create!

Once everyone was suitibly happy with the software, it was time to help in promoting the event both on our Facebook pages, Twitter and via Google AdWords. This proved quite successful as over 150 people registered for the two afternoons it was running. Then the event began...

The PG team were excellent as the first port of call for all enquires, and the academics, support services and admissions teams were all ready to be transferred their relevant queries. Then people logged on! The first and second hours of the events were hectic, before a steady flow of enquires and finally a flurry of activity at the end. Even we were impressed by the knowledge and helpfulness of our staff, and the PG team are now preparing a detailed report on how it all went (with statistics provided by us) to help inform any similar events in the future.

Just spoke to one of your advisors, they were incredibly helpful. Great way to get information, just need to write my proposal!
— James Simpson (@JamesISimpson) January 16, 2013

Overall, these events were a great success and we've already got some very exciting ideas on how to ramp it up a gear when we run something similar again...!

PS. if you attended the events then please fill out our survey for a chance to win a £50 Amazon voucher.