Read this article to understand onboarding and how to deliver services using CounselMore software.
Jump ahead in article to: Ensuring Measurable Services with Routine Assignments
Case study: Watch videos like this one; this is one of our customers who is the owner of a tutoring company, offering college guidance, All of their assignments are delivered by CounselMore to their students with a 70% student portal adoption rate. This counselor has integrated their CounselMore account with Calendly, new clients automatically appear on their account's student list and they can immediately enroll them in their program.
Best Practices
for Student Client Onboarding Process Using CounselMore Software
Preface:
This document outlines the best practices for onboarding student clients using CounselMore software. These steps are designed to streamline the onboarding process, ensuring a smooth and efficient experience for both the consultant and the client. Utilizing CounselMore's features such as integration with scheduling apps, automated data entry, and customized reports will save time and provide immediate value to clients. By following this guide, educational consultants can enhance their onboarding process, making it both comprehensive and client-friendly.
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Initial Inquiry for your student / family client
Receive Inquiry:
- Methods of Inquiry:
Potential clients can reach out via website forms, email, text, phone call, or referrals. To streamline this process, consider using a single email inquiry form generated by your scheduling app on your website.
- Example: If you have a telephone number, consider employing an answering service that takes down the necessary information and applies it to your inquiry form. This maintains a streamlined intake process. Answering services typically cost around $99 per month based on call volume.
Response to Inquiry:
- Immediate Response: Acknowledge receipt of the inquiry promptly using a scheduling app like Calendly or Acuity, which can automate responses. These apps will send a confirmation email and offer other options as well like follow-ups and reminders. Both are integrated into CounselMore with other bonus features upon integration.
- Information Request:
Use an inquiry form and ask questions on that website form to gather preliminary information about the student and their needs. This will help you assess if the prospective client is a good fit or if they should be referred to another counselor.
TIP: If you are a Zapier or Hubspot user, CounselMore can integrate with your sales team. Minimal account levels required.
This will also help you to groom the student’s portal prior to inviting the family into the technology. By using the family's answers to inform the portal, the counselor can build upon their entry with school suggestions, remarks and other bonus features, then the family will enter their portal and see their information, their schools, and most importantly, their concerns reflected back to them. Presenting clients with immediate value before the first meeting, underlines the value of the counselor's services and the software. As the student/counselor relationship grows CounselMore user-activity data shows students move from email to portal to Google Drive to assignment 'done', finding what they need, when they need it and sending notifications back to counselors.
CounselMore Integration:
- Automatic Addition:
CounselMore integrates with Calendly or Acuity, automatically adding the student's name to your quicklist in CounselMore upon scheduling. [Review instructions here]
- Portal Grooming, information collection:
Before inviting the parent and student to the portal, customize the CounselMore portal with their preliminary information. This includes:
- setting up student profile,
- adding initial college lists,
- relevant admissions data information columns
- exporting candidate to school comparison report per school reports
There is even a column called notes to student, so the counselor could add a few notes about each school if they wish. There is a links column, so if the counselor has saved interesting links about this school, that column could be added to the student’s preliminary list, again demonstrating the value of the counselor and their technology to the prospective client.
Example of portal grooming for information collection:
- Inquiry Form Completion:
Parent sends an inquiry form and schedules a meeting, paying a small fee (enabled in scheduling app) to secure the time. If the parent chooses to contract-services with the counselor after the meeting, the small fee will be credited to the larger contract-service price.
- Response Email:
Reply to the inquiry, informing the parent and student to expect portal invitations and to complete as much information as possible. (This note should be added above in the acknowledgment / confirmation of having received the inquiry form, that is sent by the scheduling app.)
- Customization:
Add schools: In the CounselMore software, the counselor will navigate to The Counselor List and add schools by name to the counselor's list and then promote those schools to the student’s list so that the student will see those schools on their college list when they enter the portal for the first time.
The counselor will also navigate to the college data menu and add the respective data columns to the student’s list. The relevant data columns would pertain to the student and family concerns that they have listed on their inquiry form. Questions asked on the scheduling app form are carried into CounselMore profile via basic included capabilities or enhanced integrations like Zapier or custom tools like Hubspot.
Add schools to the student's list based on the inquiry form, showing the family the depth of data available. Instruct the student and parent to complete student profile, generating automatic reports and saving counselor time.
TIP: By entering information in the biography banners (student profile) other reports within CounselMore will populate with this information. The Candidate Shaping Tools, generate a report that compares the student's qualifications against the schools application requirements. This allows the counselor to run a quick comparison visually, make assessments and export the report for the parent/student/clients for easier explanation of the data.
💡 Consider this: Preliminary Consultation Options offered by educational service providers to prospective clients
💡 Should you speak to the client for free for 15 minutes or should you streamline an inquiry process, ask the client to pay a deposit to secure a meeting time, and then offer a 90-minute consultation that is a paid service within itself?
It has been deemed the best practice to move the parent and family to a 90-minute consultation that leaves the family with an evaluation and next steps. Whereas a 15-minute phone call can produce follow-up questions and not offer a family actionable next steps. In some circumstances, the family may be in a position to only secure one meeting with a counselor. For this reason, that meeting should hold great value for the family and provide not only an assessment of where the student is but instructions for what they can DIY on their own in the college application process. A counselor is not asked to work for free but a family also needs the benefit of lasting and actionable advice that moves their process forward with or without the counselor's continued assistance.
💡 Free Consultation Offer:
- Short Consultation:
Offer a 15-30 minute free consultation to discuss the student's needs and explain your services. Limit this call to 15 minutes to maximize its benefit in securing new clients.
- Example:
Use this time to assess the student's needs and explain how your services can address those needs, ensuring the client understands the value you bring. Be prepared for this conversation and have a set of questions ready that will help you to obtain what you need to know from this family. For instance, if you only work with high school juniors, then you will need to ask the student’s graduation year. If you are aware that your price point is at the top of the market, then you will want to know if this family falls outside of that window and in that case, the best thing to do would be to refer them to a more appropriate counselor for service. Qualify the potential client expediently.
💡 Scheduling introductory meeting:
- App Integration:
Use a scheduling app like Calendly to allow clients to book or reschedule consultations at their convenience. In all of your communications, be very clear about your scheduling rules. If these are repeated early and often, you will not have no-shows. Refer to the CounselMore College Readiness Curriculum regarding meeting patterns per grade.
💡 Detailed Consultation Meeting
Paid Initial Meeting (Optional):
- Fee-Based Meeting:
Offer a detailed 90-minute onboarding meeting for a fee (e.g., $350-$450), which can be credited towards future services if the client signs up.
- Example:
During this meeting, provide in-depth insights into the student's academic and extracurricular background, discussing potential college fits and timelines for standardized testing. Export client facing reports from your CounselMore software to provide value and direction to the client. Create a first meeting notes template in your CounselMore software settings menu routine meeting notes. By preparing this a meeting template in advance, you create consistency in your processes and an information report ready for your initial meeting that is takes you very little time to produce. On average, grooming and preparing for a 90-minute consultation should take the counselor a an average of 20 - 30 minutes depending on the client's need and the counselor's choices of intake process. If you are a new counselor and it is taking more than an hour to prepare for the first meeting, and you've completed the training sessions, speak to a CounselMore peer mentor.
💡 Initial Meeting Content (apprx.: 90 minutes):
- Since you have already initiated the parent portal and the student portal immediately after the client booked their initial consultation, the student email and parent email would have received an invitation that took them into the portal. They completed their assignment and clicked done on the assignment. When the family clicked done, the counselor was notified that the assignment was done. The counselor can now review the portal based on the customer’s input information and generate the necessary reports and preparation for the first meeting.
- The counselor may want to have the student's list of colleges that the student mentioned on their inquiry form. The counselor may also want to add the legacy schools where the parents graduated to that list. The counselor may add some similar schools to the list and possible recommendations. The counselor may also add the college data columns that are relevant and leave notes and then the counselor will export that college list directly to the student’s Google Drive, so if the family decides not to continue working with the counselor, the family can always reference that college list in Google Drive. The counselor may also be sure to answer the family's red hot concerns right away at the top of the meeting. This will lower anxiety immediately and show the counselor as a knowledgeable person, increasing the family's trust and will deepen the ability to communicate right away.
💡 Review and Discuss with prospective clients in the initial meeting:
- Review the student's academic history, extracurricular activities, and career goals. When reviewing the student's academic history, the counselor will use the student profile and the course progression banner up against the student's submitted unofficial transcript and high school profile.
The counselor will review the participation banners within the student profile and export the student's academic banners directly to the student’s Google Drive folder, so there remains an archival history of the student's profile when they arrive to the counselor. This is important because the counselor is going to work on that profile of the student so in six months' time, if that biography were exported again, you will see a very different student. It is interesting for the counselor to show who the student was when they arrived and who the student is six months later. This is a demonstrated value to the family and should not be overlooked.
💡 Discuss Initial College List and Testing Timelines:
- Setting expectations is critical. This means that consistent rules are reiterated throughout the process.
Apply the full set of routine assignments for a college readiness curriculum to the student's account.
Are there any assignments that do not apply to this student's situation?
If yes, click Done on each of those assignments. The Done assignments will drop to the completed assignments banner at the bottom of the page. If circumstances change and you need to reinstate and assignment, just un-check the Done box.
TIP: By entering information in the biography banners (student profile) other client facing reports will populate with this information. The Candidate Shaping Tools, generate a report that compares the student's qualifications against the schools application requirements. This allows the counselor to run a quick comparison visually, make assessments and export the report for the parent/student/clients for easier explanation of the data.
CounselMore Educational Service Delivery Management:
➡️ Ensuring Measurable Services with "Routine Assignments", saved in groups by product name, assigned to student, used to measure service delivery timeline, which informs all analytics.
Keeping your services measurable is crucial for maintaining efficiency and accountability. By building a set of routine assignments that represent the products the counselor is selling, we can measure where each customer is in each product of services. A set of routine assignments for each product type allows the company to evaluate each counselor's delivery of services.
Reports can be generated to assess counselors' capacity to serve, time spent per student, and time spent per product. By navigating to the dashboard and filtering the assignments report, counselors can see students who have not yet completed assignments, those who have completed assignments, and the percentage of routine assignments completed.
TIP: Further along in the college application process, the counselor will use the application tracker. The application tracker will generate assignments for each application requirement, continuing to measure progress. Because there is a measurement of services, there is a continuous overview of all students across all product services.
Walk through all of the most relevant assignments, letting the student know that they will not be completing all these assignments at one time; they will be metered out on a scheduled basis.
TIP: The counselor can set the release date of each assignment per student. Even though there is a single set of assignments that represents a given product and all students who have selected that product will be assigned the same set of assignments, not all students will complete all assignments and they will not complete them at the same time because all students timelines are different because they start at different times. The set of assignments that represents the service product is the promise of services, the counselor tailors the list of tasks based on student need, then sets the release date of each assignment based on the individual student's timeline. Because the service has the ability to be measured, all other tracking becomes possible. This is the beauty of CounselMore's deep research into how college counselors administered services and their expressed need to counsel more in less time with less friction of process. CounselMore answered their call.
It is most important that the counselor is expressing their expectations of the student working in the student portal and the rules of engagement.
All 3 look alike!
There are 3 portals - The counselor's portal, the parent's portal and the student's portal. All 3 look the same. This allows all 3 to be familiar and comfortable in the portal faster.. From the moment the counselor shares their screen to provide orientation, the student can log into their own portal and have an immediate sense of direction.
TIP: Most counselors meet over web-call. Set up your work space to have a external monitor. This will allow you to have one screen dedicated to the counselor's portal open, where you can navigate, take notes, the counselor can liberally use their portal while engaged in a meeting. While the other screen is dedicated to the student's screen share of their portal window. When the meeting begins ask the student to log into their student portal and share their screen. Allow the student to do the navigating. Focus the administration of services through the portal. When you do, so will the student - and your services will be measured, consistent and congruent.
Need customization? We do that too. Contact us.
CounselMore Onboarding:
- Onboard the client to the CounselMore portal during the first meeting.
- Example: Show the client how to navigate the CounselMore
Related article: How to groom the portal prior to inviting a client
Related article: How can I leverage CounselMore SEO?
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