Penn Foster, founded back in 1890, has had over 13 million people have enrolled in their College, Career School and High School. With current enrollment of over 133,000 active students, programs focus on such fields as Veterinary Technician, Business, Medical Coding and Billing, HVAC Technician and Pharmacy Technician to name a few. It is a big operation that graduates roughly 28,000 students per year and has evolved into a pure play online educational services company.
It happens to do so quite well. In fact, Penn Foster announced that it has reached the finals of the ICMI’s Global Contact Center Awards in the Best Use of an Emerging Channel category. These global awards are designed to acknowledge the efforts of individuals, organizations and contact centers that provide a platform for fostering vision and leadership to drive strategic accomplishments and innovations in the industry. Penn Foster was selected as a finalist for its innovative ‘Penn Foster Community’, an online student community.
Joe Gagnon, president and CEO at Penn Foster, said “We are honored to be selected as a finalist for this prestigious, global award. We continually hear from students how the Online Community is an important part of their student experience, providing the support from peers and faculty they need to progress in their studies and achieve their goals. It’s gratifying to see our Community recognized as a game-changing educational resource for our students, while having a significant impact on our business.”
Penn Foster Community was created to reduce the ever increasing cost per interaction between the staff and students, which was triggered by a huge rise in the enrollments. Prior to the launch of the Community, the communication channels were mostly limited to phone calls and emails with the sparing use of instant messaging.
To meet the growing need for cost effective interaction and leverage the benefits of social media, Penn Foster Community was launched in July 2012 featuring various aspects such as community map for students to find each other in their locality, student blogs, polls, group discussions, events’ calendar, video and document sharing amongst others. The Community garnered around 64,622 users within a year of launch. This unprecedented growth of 200 percent recorded by the Community resulted in a reduction of cost per interaction between the faculty and students while reducing the email traffic by nearly 40 percent.