TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICES THAT OPTIMISE RECRUITMENT, RETENTION AND ENGAGEMENT IN EDUCATION
TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICES THAT OPTIMISE RECRUITMENT, RETENTION AND ENGAGEMENT IN EDUCATION
WHO
WE ARE
Cenote Solutions delivers specialist applications and services to the education and training sectors, maximising the value of data institutions already have in order to facilitate improved recruitment, retention, successful outcomes and operational delivery models, particularly for international admissions and the whole student experience.
With over thirty years working in almost every aspect of technology and transformation, the team at Cenote has delivered some of the most complex and demanding software and consultancy projects in Australia and New Zealand. We focus on adding to core enterprise applications in functional areas where none of those system suppliers is able to create the highly specialised software that institutions increasingly need to deliver outstanding student experiences and protect revenues.
The best way to understand fully what we do and how we do it is to arrange to talk to us but, in the meantime, the details below should be sufficient to inform, inspire and excite!
WHY CENOTE?
For those who have not been fortunate enough to travel to Mexico and visit a deep and beautiful underground cenote, the reason for the name may be a mystery.
When called a 'sinkhole', the cenote doesn't sound too attractive! However, when you see one and dive into its crystal clear waters,.... that is another matter entirely.
Fed from a multitude of subterranean sources, cenotes are not dissimilar to tertiary education data flows - lots of dark hidden places that few ever know are there, let alone go to.
OUR VISION
We turn data into insight and insight into action, meaningful action.
We focus where it matters; on the student, their recruitment, their experience and their outcomes; absolutely everything else you need to make your institution successful follows from these things.
We want to maximise the value you get from the plethora of data sources you already have but has not been joined up to focus on what those data mean and what to do about it.
OUR TECHNOLOGY
Our applications are built from the bottom up to be cloud-deployed, fully responsive, secure and accessibility compliant.
Each of our applications has been designed to be integrated with your current systems and data, with your existing authentication models and to reflect your organisational structures, role, permissions and operational models.
OUR
SOFTWARE
Experience and Engagement Management
It is remarkable how much money and time organisations are prepared to invest in applications that, more or less, do the same things as each other and do so in the name of 'customer relationship management.' It is as though the mere fact that a system has the tag 'CRM' means that, by some form of magic, the recording of communications in a transactional record-keeping system is going to create significantly greater insights into your students or other stakeholders. Does recording notes about a phone call actually tell you how a student is feeling, what the best course of action is to support that student or what the level of risk is that the student will never enrol, will withdraw before census or sometime later or is likely to fail?
The whole point of what we have developed is that our software, Student Pulse, not only offers the single richest source of student and stakeholder information in your organisation, but also has the tools and analytics able to provide real and meaningful information on where you should focus your resources, how, why and when. It can then automate the processes of engaging with every student as an individual and ensure that actions are followed up in a timely and personalised way, making your students feel cared for and connected with their learning and your organisation.
To do this we ingest as much of the data as you can give us from your existing systems as often as you can give it to us, usually at least once every 24 hours. We provide a ready-to-use education-specific data warehouse that you can extend and configure to suit your needs, but one that comes with pretty much everything you need out-of-the-box. Whether it is student, courses, units, assessments, learning management system activities (even down to discussion threads), attendance, accommodation, agents, access control, external companies, staff etc etc, Pulse can accommodate your data.
Once it is safe and secure inside Pulse, it can be profiled, analysed, compared and contrasted, challenged and cleaned while all the time being used to generate personalised, contextualised and timely engagements with your students, your staff, your partner companies and anyone else you need to communicate with. It chases when needed, it adapts channels when needed and it auto-cancels when time is up or individual circumstances change.
The simple schematic below tries to illustrate the closed loop model of data management and reuse. Every completed engagement, whether a phone call, a meeting, a text message, chat or email is recorded not as crude notes incapable of being analysed, but as a blend of structured data and explanatory text on which Pulse can report and act.
The sections below provide more detail on specific areas of functionality and can be implemented individually if you wish.
OUR
SERVICES
Systems Procurement and Implementation
We implement our own applications - obviously we do that and we're pretty good at it; pragmatic, agile, decisive, creative and bloody hard workers. We can become part of your teams, living and breathing the change management, the data integration, the communications strategy, the training and the go-live. Or we can do it the 'traditional way' - up to you but we know which we prefer and works better.
In addition, we also help you procure other systems that are crucial to your institution's operational management and student lifecycle. Because we have been doing education technology for over 30 years, we have seen most things, done most things and know most things about most suppliers. When you've sold systems for decades, you get pretty good at knowing what salespeople are trying to do to you and even better at making sure they don't!
In our clients section, there are a few case studies of work we have done; those should help explain what we do and how we do it; far better than descriptions of our 'unique methodology' or 'paradigm-shifting philosophy'.
Interim Leadership and Transformation
There is nothing like having to make decisions, live and die by them and see them transform the way institutions work, staff behave and students benefit to make you understand how exciting, invigorating and vital working in education can be. Because we have been around the education world for so long and done a wide variety of roles, we are able to step into your institutions and take on roles and challenges that many others might struggle to. It's not that others don't have the knowledge of what the role is but it's often that they struggle to break the boundaries of constraining organisational and operational habits, norms and mores. To do that, to break through and achieve real and rapid change, takes experience of major change and transformation projects where the 'impossible' became the 'credible' and then the new reality. Only then do staff colleagues and leadership look back and realise that what couldn't be done in a few months actually could be done and was done.
That is what we do. Have a look at some of our case studies below to find out more. If you want a list of all the methodology boxes we can tick, then please ask; it's a pretty long list but clients are better as references.
OUR
TEAM
We'd like to introduce the Cenote Team:
Mark Sampson
CEO
Mark has over thirty years working in the EdTech sector in many countries across the world, in particular in the UK and Asia Pacific. Having built and led large companies, worked in exec roles in VET and HE, Mark is the creator and driver of Student Pulse and Cenote.
He has implemented some of the largest and most complex student management systems in education, bears the scars and brings those experiences to the way he engages with a passion and drive to change the ways students are engaged and supported
With a fair fewer years than Mark (don't those years just show!), Luke brings a remarkable level of experience and knowledge of how to implement Student Pulse successfully.
Perhaps it has something to do not only with his enormous capacity for hard work and his determination but also because it was only a few years ago that Luke was himself a student, working in student support while he completed his degree. A perfect blend of recent experience and devotion to changing things for the better
Lead Consultant
Luke Fenech
Of course, there are plenty more people who do the incredible work of taking the ideas the Luke and Mark have (plus all the feedback we get from users of our software) and turn those ideas beautiful Figma designs (thanks Jed) , into code, components and all the super-clever stuff that goes into building an enterprise application such as Student Pulse (thanks wonderful development teams). Keeping everyone in order and on task we have our lovely project manager (thanks Kenny). The team has been working together for years now and really understand what Pulse is for and not just how the code works.
OUR
CLIENTS
Cenote is very proud to have worked with the following leaders in education:
WHAT
THEY SAY
A few things our clients have had to say about our offerings:
“As a small but rapidly growing technology business working in education, it is sometimes hard to navigate the challenges and changes we have to respond to. Having Mark alongside us to advise, guide and support us has been invaluable. His ability to see beyond the immediate need and identify where the added value lies how allowed us to accelerate developments and market initiatives more quickly and effectively. His commercial experience and judgement has played an important role in some of our most significant contracts and we look forward to working with him for many years to come.”
Ben Grozier, CEO of ClassCover
NEWS
A lovely award - November 22
We are delighted to have been recognised for our market-leading work by APAC CIO Outlook who have placed as one of the top 5 education technology companies in Australia.
We believe passionately in what we do and work hard to try to be creative and yet pragmatic, ambitious and yet realistic, confident but not arrogant.
When someone from the outside world recognises that we have done some cool stuff and made a difference, that is a lovely acknowledgment that we are getting some stuff right. Always plenty of room for getting more stuff right, but it is nice to feel seen and appreciated by some industry experts.
