A year after launching its student review portal for study travel, ICEF has revamped its CourseFinders website to look more modern, be optimised for all mobile devices and include enhanced search and review functions.
Student reviews continue to be a focal point of the platform, now with an updated “review tool” that shows students reviews from their cultural peers. For example, students in Brazil see reviews from other Brazilian students first.
Agents and schools can add the tool to their websites to encourage students to rate their experience and Ross Holmes, Business Development Manager for Online Products at ICEF, said it can also be useful for agents at the point of sale.
“When agents have suggested a school but the student is perhaps looking for some assurance they can point to CourseFinders as a source of independent reviews that are relevant to that student,” he told The Pie News.
Keen to boost traffic and enquiries, ICEF has simplified the enquiry process and plans to roll out the platform in more languages
Since February, the site, free to schools and agents, has accumulated 766 reviews and just under 30,000 visits mostly from Europe and Latin America.
Direct enquires can be made through the website which, ideally, schools then pass on to their preferred agents in that market.
“We’ve had a diverse range of visitors from countries that are traditionally agent-centric so there’s a big push for schools to send their leads to their agents in those countries mainly because agents do a better job of following them up and actually getting students into the classroom,” commented Holmes.
Despite high traffic numbers, Holmes is keen to increase leads by simplifying the enquiry process- previously four stages– and rolling out the platform in more languages.
“At the moment the site is only available in English, German, Spanish and Portuguese, this year we plan to add many more languages including French, Polish, Russian and Turkish,” he said.
Students sign on through their Facebook account and can search for language courses based on the language, destination country or city, a certificate they want to obtain or activities they want to be included alongside language tuition.
Search results are displayed based on how compatible the school is with the search terms, how complete its profile is and the number of student reviews it has. As of October, there were 681 schools actively using the site.
