Key Findings of the Enquiry Experience Tracker 2024

1 in 5 inquiries go unanswered — audit your response rate now
Twenty percent of student inquiries receive no response at all, a figure that's held steady across the full history of the Enquiry Experience Tracker. As Jenni Parsons put it: "One in five inquiries still receive no response whatsoever. And that's not good enough." For any institution spending on marketing to generate student interest, a 20% non-response rate is direct erosion of that budget. The first step is pulling your inquiry data and understanding where the drop-off happens before it can be fixed.

Warm responses cut negative sentiment from 25% down to 1%
Tone isn't soft, it's measurable. When students received a warm response to their inquiry, only 1% reported an overall negative experience. When the response was cold or impersonal, that figure jumped to 25%. That's a 24-point swing in student perception based on nothing more than how staff communicate. Training admissions and recruitment teams to write warmer, more human replies is one of the highest-return investments an institution can make.

Students prefer humans over chatbots by a 4-to-1 margin
The 2024 tracker found students rated their interactions with humans four times more positively than their interactions with bots. This doesn't mean chatbots have no place in inquiry management, but it does mean institutions that have fully automated first contact are likely creating a poor first impression. If bot-handling is necessary for capacity reasons, it's worth auditing whether a human handoff can happen earlier in the conversation.

Two-way conversation triples your offer-to-enroll conversion rate
Once a genuine back-and-forth dialogue is established with a prospective student, the likelihood of converting from offer to enrollment increases by roughly 3x. This isn't about sending more emails; it's about creating actual dialogue. Inquiry workflows should be designed to invite responses, not just deliver information. A follow-up message asking a specific question gets much further than a broadcast update.

Multi-channel engagement doubles conversion — don't default to email only
Students who receive outreach across more than one channel are twice as likely to convert. Yet many institutions default to email alone, leaving phone, SMS, and social touchpoints largely unused after the initial inquiry. Mapping out which channels your prospective students actually use, and building your follow-up sequences to reach them there, is a practical and data-backed way to improve yield.

A quarter of responding institutions still don't follow up
Getting a response out is only half the job. The tracker found that 1 in 5 students who received a response got no subsequent follow-up. For institutions that have already done the hard work of building inquiry response processes, this is a gap worth closing quickly. A simple follow-up sequence, even just one or two touchpoints after the initial reply, is enough to move students further through the funnel.

The UK and ANZ score gains show what's possible with individual attention
The 2024 global tracker score rose 4 points, driven largely by improvements in the UK and Australia/New Zealand. Jenni Parsons attributed those gains in part to lower pipeline volumes in 2024, which gave teams more capacity to engage students individually rather than at scale. For institutions in markets where volume pressure is high, that connection is worth examining: what's the minimum viable process change that preserves some of that one-to-one quality?