I was involved in higher education marketing for the last 8 years if my career. I was mainly involved in worldwide promotion of online MBA’s of different universities and college. My promotion activities included SEO, PPC, Lead Generation through publishers, job sites and other affiliates. I also did email marketing through various platforms. We generated lumpsum data during the process and did not ever think of neither artificial intelligence nor Big Data in any of these activities performed.
Role of Artificial Intelligence
The data at that time was caught in the CRM and was assigned to appropriate student counselors or admission officers. As some of the clients started to spend more in the digital market, the data cumulated over our end and became tough to be managed. Either the system crashed or website hung. Users over the website started to complain about slow website and counselors became late to contact the hot enquiry. We even started to lose business as we were stuck to the old technology.
We craved for a solution and finally were advised to use big data or a faster database to handle the cumulative data.We soon moved over to an Oracle database from a traditional Excel worksheet.This was the change in the database side. This transition was an important decision. Sometimes even a big data powerhouse has to be used for faster processing if the size of data is even bigger.
However, the assigning of data to the student counselors, finding out the best performing student counselor, finding the best data providing agency, finding the best digital campaigns etc were the other tedious tasks that needed manual attention. For your information, these can also be automated. Even if you think these are minor tasks, bringing in automation leads to greater results as the workforce can be engaged with something else. This is where artificial intelligence comes to play. Automation should be done where ever possible and this is nothing less than an application of artificial intelligence.
What kind of artificial intelligence were applied?
We work with 50+ agencies or publishers or search engines and other networks. Quality of data of each and every agency is different. All the bulk data is assigned equally to all counselors. So, each counselor has a data of every colour ie of each and every agency, data from various search engines, different publisher data etc. We thereby developed an artificial intelligence application which was used to identify the best agency. The agency which gives more admissions is chosen as the best. At the same time the best student counselor is also chosen based on performance. The one who gives in more no of admissions from the given data set is chosen as the best counselor. The artificial intelligence application then assigns automatically the data of the best agency to the best counselor. This hidden strategy of assigning the best data to the best counselor enhances the student admission rate further. The reason behind this is the thought that why to waste good quality data on a badly performing counselor.
These kind of small application of artificial intelligence in real business scenarios have helped boost the business in unexpected ways.
