At a glance
Our client was looking to understand the experiences of international students paying for their tuition fees to UK universities. This insight would help them to enhance the payment service they offer. By engaging IFF, they received first hand insight into students’ payment journeys along with a series of recommendations around how students could be better informed and supported along the way.
Challenges and objectives
As a key service provider to students across the globe, our client’s main research need was understanding and accommodating the different payment set-ups and options available to students in different markets. By getting the right insight, they would be able to identify improvements that were applicable and beneficial to all users.
Our client wanted to understand the payment experience of students across a range of markets, any barriers they faced when making payments, the support they sought, and to establish what would make the payment journey easier in the future.
Solution
The study was conducted across two consecutive waves; each wave collected insight via a mixed methods approach:
1. An online survey of international students from a pre-selected list of UK universities to understand the experiences of students at scale. Earlier iterations of the survey had been conducted by another research agency and so our client wanted us to build further on the existing question set, while still allowing for comparisons to be drawn with previous data.
2. A mix of on-campus and online focus groups with international students to explore some of the key issues raised in the online survey in much greater depth.
A key insight need for our client was to understand the distinct issues faced by Nigerian students when making payments internationally from Nigeria. This meant that in the first wave of the research supplementary focus groups were conducted specifically with Nigerian students.
Impact
As part of the reporting outputs, our client received several case studies which encapsulated the payment journeys for different students from different countries, who paid for their fees in different ways. The purpose of these case studies was to capture real life student accounts which demonstrated how varied the payment journey could be.
As a result of the research, they also received a series of recommendations structured around the key milestones of the payment journey. These focussed on the support that they could lend universities particularly around language and timings of communications on payments.
