The first step to developing high-ROI programs is to develop a deep understanding of learners’ needs, learning preferences, and challenges.
We’re committed to supporting universities as they serve online learners at every step of their journey, from the initial outreach to interested, prospective students to supporting students through to graduation. This commitment includes helping our partners better understand student behaviors to improve retention.
Risepoint supports hundreds of online programs across the globe. Because of the diverse group of universities that we support, and the number of learners we have supported over time (over 825,000!), we’re uniquely positioned to gain key data-driven insights to help our partners better serve their learners.
The challenge: How do universities really understand what students are thinking?
While some students of online programs share similar challenges and motivators, each individual student has unique needs and requirements for academic success. How do universities really understand what prospective students are thinking and draw quantifiable, trackable, and actionable insights from those thoughts? This challenge presents an opportunity for universities to truly meet student needs.
Risepoint spends more than 250,000 hours speaking with prospective and enrolled students at our partner universities every year. During these phone calls, our teams develop relationships with students to help them overcome challenges and stay the course through their online programs. These conversations provide us with valuable anecdotal feedback, but it’s nearly impossible to extract deep student insights from the calls alone. That would require coding of more than one million calls a year, deciphering variability in interpretation, and having an objective understanding of the nuances of each student’s circumstances.
Solution: AI-powered student insights for actionable feedback
In 2025, we introduced a powerful AI-driven synthesis of student conversations to help our partners understand the student and inform their journey. This AI capability is trained to distinguish the context of our conversations with prospective and enrolled students and can then identify and categorize over 50 challenges that students encounter along their journey.
Through this process, we can extract deep student insights that we were previously unable to synthesize and provide immediate, measurable feedback to universities. This feedback ultimately improve the student experience in the following ways:
- More helpful outreach: If, for example, we saw that students at a particular partner often had questions about application deadlines, we might suggest including that information in a marketing campaign. Or perhaps students often want to understand the typical careers a person would have after program completion. A new blog post on careers might be the answer. Understanding student questions helps guide more relevant information so that prospective students can feel more confident and informed during their discovery process.
- Improved engagement: A deeper understanding of common questions and concerns lets us equip our student-facing teams with the right information and tools to address key concerns before they arise, which creates a better student experience.
- Program alignment: Sometimes the feedback we hear is about the program structure itself. This information supports productive ongoing conversations with partners on what’s working and what’s not based on data-driven student sentiment and decision insights. These insights can help inform program faculty as they build curriculum and determine how to best support skill building.
- Enhanced reporting: With this system, we have and can share with our partners nearly immediate, synthesized, and quantitative insights in a structured, actionable format.
Results: Transforming student feedback into next steps for universities
Within weeks of launching the tool, we leveraged the AI analysis capability to support a university with enrollment challenges and deferred starts. In conversations with students in the enrollment process, our software noticed an outlier in the number of students who mentioned the application process as a hurdle. After digging further, we realized that half the students who found the application process challenging were having difficulty meeting the short application window — prospective students needed more time to apply, and the shorter window resulted in a notable increase in deferred starts.
With this data, we were able to return to the university partner with a clear actionable takeaway for improved enrollments: their students needed longer application windows.
This example is just one of the many ways that we are using technology to support our commitment to help our university partners better understand and serve their students.
Meet the author:
Ian Hennessy, Director of Integrated Marketing at Risepoint
As a Director on the Risepoint Integrated Marketing team, Ian works with our university partners to deepen the understanding of the market they serve and prospective students.
