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Understanding user journey, frontstage and backstage processes, supporting systems and data flow to guide experience enhancement and reduce student withdrawal rates.
The context
University students can withdraw from any university subject without financial consequence before census day, which typically falls three weeks into a 12-week unit. OUA has identified a concerning trend: withdrawal rates before census day have increased over the last few years.
Post-withdrawal research and surveys showed a consistent narrative of an 'unavoidable withdrawal', where life 'got in the way' - e.g. lost job or health reasons - and therefore, study is no longer a priority.
The internal view was that surveys often overreport these figures as they are an easy excuse that avoids further questioning.
OUA over-indexed non-traditional learners who are known to have higher rates of withdrawal. The reasons are multifaceted and range from pragmatic (lower digital literacy, non-academically inclined, higher barriers to study-life balance) to emotional (less confident, embarrassed to ask for help, no sense of belonging).
The objective
OUA needed a holistic overview of the student journey, from application/enrolment to census day, across different channels and touchpoints in order to:
Identify user pain points, service inconsistencies, and bottlenecks and
Provide alignment across teams, mainly digital, non-digital and admin, to optimise the overall service delivery and enhance the customer experience, thus reducing the withdrawal rate.
My role
I ran the discovery and service design initiative, including workshop facilitation, one-to-one interviews and stakeholder management.
The approach
Internal SMEs' engagement in different workshops and 1-on-1 sessions allowed me to understand both customer journey and internal systems and processes.
Different teams contributed to building the service blueprint by providing their specialised insights into their respective areas—such as processes, systems, customer interactions, and data flows—ensuring that the blueprint accurately reflected the service's end-to-end experience and operational complexity.
To address the challenge, I chose to use a service blueprint, a detailed visual tool that maps out all the service elements, including customer interactions, frontstage and backstage processes, supporting systems, and data flows.
A service blueprint typically emphasises the organisational perspective—focusing on the processes and interactions that underpin the customer experience— and differs from a customer journey map, which is centred on the customer's viewpoint, highlighting emotions stemming from the interactions with the service at various touchpoints.
Recognising the value in both approaches, I merged these tools to create a comprehensive overview that captured both the user's interactions and their emotions and the organisation's processes, systems, and data flows allowing those interactions.
This allowed me to present both the emotional and pragmatic aspects within a single artefact.
Leveraging our existing customer journey section, I mapped out the student's interactions—including their actions, thoughts, and emotions—across multiple channels and touchpoints. I then delved into the organisational perspective by engaging relevant stakeholders such as product managers, eDM managers, Advisory channel optimisation managers, student solutions and the analytics teams to explore the intricacies of these interactions.
It took several iterations and refinements to complete the draft. Then it was about making it easy to read and visually appealing.
The outcome
The blueprint allowed me to identify some significant themes to further explore and prioritise for improvement or optimisation within the service, turning them into an opportunity tree.
Ultimately, a possible withdrawal starts the day of the enrolment if the student is not understood and nurtured. Any intervention at the time of withdrawal may be too late.
The key was to identify and act on signals before the (withdrawal) action, and the service blueprint allowed us to identify those signals.
Three main opportunities touched three different business areas:
Student Portal: Build a deliberate and guided experience following the 'getting ready to study' information that the organisation provides via other channels, such as advisory, eDM, and blogs.
Messaging: Sync up eDM messages with the student portal content to create message resonance and reassure and engage students. Create a feedback mechanism to understand whether students have taken action on the organisation's recommendations.
Advisory: Capture data in a more structured fashion or in a way that can be easily interpreted and leveraged. Create a mood scale and withdrawal risk score to assign to students after any conversation. Investigate the relation between mood/doubts/questions and the risk of withdrawal.
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