How Monarch Institute Achieved 11K+ Chat Qualified Leads in One Year
About Monarch Institute
Monarch Institute is a nationally accredited education provider based in Australia. But don’t let the name fool you into imagining sterile classrooms and irrelevant coursework — Monarch Institute delivers a real-world education with courses taught by respected professionals who are leaders in their fields.
“We don’t believe in courses based purely on intellectual theory and textbook stuff,” their website says. In short, Monarch Institute teaches tangible skills to people who want jobs in their respective fields.
The Challenge
Education is a complex product. But add in prospective students who are trying to understand government funding and eligibility criteria that vary state by state, and it becomes quickly apparent how important it is to have sales and marketing teams who can help students navigate their diverse needs in a frictionless way.
Nick Chapman, CEO at Monarch Institute, began looking for a chat solution when he realized that the team needed a tool that could provide that same frictionless experience for their students during the team’s off hours.
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Nick Chapman
The Solution
Monarch Institute looked at several chatbots with similar out-of-the-box features, but ultimately wanted a solution that would help them build out a more complex experience. “We wanted to build out further branches to allow people to explore and get really relevant and engaging information,” Nick said.
In addition, the team was looking for a solution that would ensure a consistent customer experience. “Our purchases or sales cycles are usually quite long where some courses can go up to two years, so these are quite big decisions for people to be making. We want to make sure that the digital experience or phone-based experience is replicable of what they actually would experience when they’re a student of ours,” he said.
And Drift was just the solution for the job.
A SEAMLESS ONBOARDING EXPERIENCE
With the help of The Bot Lab, a Drift partner specializing exclusively in developing scalable chatbot experiences, Monarch went live with Drift in 2019. “We should give a big shout-out to The Bot Lab as an integration partner for Drift,” Nick said. “From the initial conversation, all the way through to implementing, to building our first bot, and working through what we wanted to do in this space, it was a pretty seamless and painless process.”
A highly targeted playbook strategy
From the beginning, Monarch set up their chatbots to carefully target different site visitors.
“We use Drift in a pretty complex way across our website. Depending largely on where you are coming from and the course you are interested in, there will be a different playbook presented to you,” Nick explained.
He cited a great example of their granular targeting; “If you’re visiting our website and you’re interested in a course and you’ve landed on that page through a paid search, you will be presented with a bot that talks to you about that specific course. But if you happen to be in a postcode that is available for government funding, we will present you with a completely different playbook which allows you to go and assess yourself for government funding.”
Nick Chapman
A DIFFERENTIATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Customer experience was always a top priority for Monarch. With Drift, the team can target prospective students with the right message for who they are and where they’re coming from.
“Our tutors have a significant impact on our prospective student experience,” Nick shared. “It certainly was the main reason for us going with Drift in the first place. We wanted a sophisticated system that allowed us to replicate the experience of being a student to someone who’s not quite a student yet or is considering their options.”
As Nick explained, “There is nothing worse than someone saying you could be eligible for funding, and then you start having that conversation and say, ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize that you’re based in New South Wales. We don’t have funding there, but our courses are still reasonably priced.’ That’s not a conversation we want to have. We want to say, ‘If you’re based in this state, these are the options that you may have.’”
With Drift integrated directly into both Salesforce and Pardot, Monarch can create differentiated and data-informed journeys for their prospective students. “The ability for our course consultants, who are probably having three or four conversations at a time, to transfer information back into [Salesforce] so that we can capture that and trigger a range of workflows or engagements beyond there is really important.”
ENGAGEMENT UNINHIBITED BY OPERATING HOURS
Monarch’s elevated customer experience extends outside of the traditional nine-to-five. “At any point in time outside of our business hours, Drift is there,” Nick explained. “And it’s our virtual sales agent that lets you know which potential students are exploring our brand and engaging. We use Drift for all of our sales agents who are part of the conversation. We use it just like other channels, like phone, SMS, or email.”
Nick Chapman
key insights inside every conversation
Beyond providing a differentiated customer experience any time of day, Drift helps Monarch home in on key trends or areas of ambiguity for students. “Drift serves a really important purpose for developing insights,” Nick said. ‘It gives us a really tactile understanding of the actual conversations that are happening between our prospective students and our course consultants. It allows us to easily identify trends in what people are asking.”
And compared to traditional platforms that only share hotspots and lead sources, with Drift insights, Monarch can tweak their playbooks and marketing strategy with more specificity, meaning their conversations are only getting better over time.
The Results
Monarch’s insights, targeting, and always-on methodology have gone a long way in creating some powerful results for the team. “Drift has had a significant impact and I think it’ll continue to have a larger impact as more of our conversations go from traditional telephone-based conversations to an omnichannel approach whereby there might be multiple engagements at various points that students choose,” Nick shared.
In the last year alone, Monarch has seen some spectacular results using Drift:
Monarch only sees Drift growing with their business as they expand chat more broadly across their brands, offer new products, and continue to make strategic acquisitions.
Nick Chapman
