TERMINALFOUR Brings Digital Engagement to Higher Education

Last year TERMINALFOUR made a big strategic decision. It decided to focus its web content management platform on the needs of higher education. Higher ed isn’t exactly a new market for them, but to put all your focus on one single market – especially one like higher ed – could have been risky. But TERMINALFOUR understands the needs of higher education institutions well. With over 120 colleges and universities using its platform at the time, it was a market that just made plain sense.

Maybe you think that colleges and universities don’t need customer experience platforms. We certainly don’t see many CXM solutions on the market that cater to them, and they do have requirements that a “traditional CXM” platform doesn’t have – particularly around student recruitment processes and fundraising.

I had a great conversation with Piero Tintori, CEO and Founder of TERMINALFOUR about the higher education market, and what his company is doing to support their needs and help them increase revenues. Tintori told me while some dismiss higher ed as a small, not so interesting market, the scale is actually huge and it has very unique needs that aren’t supported by out of the box CXM solutions.

Re-Architecting the Platform

So what has TERMINALFOUR done this past year to focus its platform on this niche? It invested $2 million to revitalize and completely focus the platform. According to its release, TERMINALFOUR put 55,000 development hours into the TERMINALFOUR Digital Engagement Platform, adding 150 new feature enhancements and performing an extensive re-architecture.

Tintori said that the core of TERMINALFOUR was solid, built on JAVA, but the rest (40%) was stripped and rebuilt using modern technologies such as AngularJS, Spring, Hybernate and others. The UI was completely modernized with a responsive design focused on tablets and smartphones. This architecture change means product development will be quicker.

TERMINALFOUR has implemented agile development and better product management, which Tintori pointed out, means they can add features quickly, fix bugs faster and respond to feedback in a way they couldn’t before. Plus it’s faster – 33% faster according to their tests.

Helping Institutions With the Numbers

Tintori explained that for TERMINALFOUR, it’s not about the product, but about helping institutions with their numbers. If their platform can help do that, then it’s the right fit.

Tintori listed four main revenue streams for most higher education institutions:

1. Recruitment – This is particularly important for undergrads (the biggest group of students) and post graduates (who spend the most money).
2. Alumni fundraising – Tintori noted that higher education in the UK and Australia are behind countries like the US with fundraising capabilities.
3. Portal – For existing students, better experiences across tablets and mobile devices are critical. This one is less about revenue and more about integration.
4. Research – They need a way to promote and manage the research they do online. This is very much about good content marketing.

TERMINALFOUR Digital Engagement Platform

The announcement today is for the new TERMINALFOUR Digital Engagement Platform. It comes in two editions:

1. TERMINALFOUR Site Manager 8 – this is the web content management platform that underlies the full digital engagement platform, and
2. TERMINALFOUR Engage.edu – the full digital engagement platform designed specifically for higher education.

One of the new features of the full platform is the Performance Dashboard, shown below:

The performance dashboard links into different back-end systems providing a full view of what’s happening for things like registrations, course sign up and more. One example Tintori gave was a course that was listed on the website that wasn’t getting many registrations. The dashboard would show the number of registrations, taken from another system and the performance of that listed course on the website. Using this information, the marketing team would be able to do things to bring more attention to the course listing, which would help improve registration numbers.

Additional modules that tie into the dashboard focus on personalization and targeting, and online forms and the transaction engine.

The latest version of TERMINALFOUR includes three new modules: a prospectus and course catalog builder for prospective students, an improved campus events calendar, and a course search and comparison solution.

I asked the purpose for selling the web content management on its own. Tintori said that for many it’s a spring-board to the full platform. There are some, especially in the US market, that are more budget-wise or simply need to get the basics in place, before they dive into the full engagement platform.

Higher Education Needs the Right Customer Experience

When it comes to selecting the right university or college, things have changed greatly. The costs to attend are going up, and students are looking hard for the right fit for their plans. The internet has changed how schools are selected too. Like shopping for consumer based goods, students spend a lot of time online researching the schools that interest them, narrowing down the list of alternatives long before they do school visits. Universities and colleges can’t depend on well manicured lawns, and open-house days to sway. They need to have a great online presence and they need to personalize the experience for each user taking those extra steps to make the student feel like the school really cares about helping make the right choice.

Today, TERMINALFOUR has as customers 140 universities and colleges around the world. They have 48% market penetration in the UK, and they are working hard to help these customers do things the commercial world is doing for their customers. Tintori said that are 4,000 universities in the US alone, of which TERMINALFOUR is targeting a portion (they already have 50-60 customers in the US, including the University of Florida). He also said that the Australian market, while small, is a big opportunity due to large endowments and revenues.

Tintori said TERMINALFOUR’s vision to help its customers is to “manage, measure, engage, transact”. That does sound like the same vision for commercial businesses, but it’s specialized to higher education and to me it makes sense.

Next week, the new version of TERMINALFOUR is going out to a test group, but expect it to be generally available in December.

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