HBR:

On paper, both traditional and online students might look similar. A 35-year-old and an 18-year-old working toward an accounting degree need the same courses, right? But LeBlanc and his team saw that the job the online students were hiring SNHU to do had almost nothing in common with the job that “coming of age” undergraduates hired the school to do. On average, online students are 30 years old, juggling work and family, and trying to squeeze in an education. Often they still carry debt from an earlier college experience. They’re not looking for social activities or a campus scene. They need higher education to provide just four things: convenience, customer service, credentials, and speedy completion times. That, the team realized, presented an enormous opportunity.

SNHU’s online program was in competition not with local colleges but with other national online programs, including those offered by both traditional colleges and for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix and ITT Technical Institute. Even more significantly, SNHU was competing with nothing. Nonconsumption. Suddenly, the market that had seemed finite and hardly worth fighting for became one with massive untapped potential.

What experiences will help customers make the progress they’re seeking in a given circumstance?
For older students, information about financial aid is critical; they need to find out if continuing their education is even possible, and time is of the essence. Often they’re researching options late at night, after a long day, when the kids have finally gone to sleep. So responding to a prospective student’s inquiry with a generic e-mail 24 hours later would often miss the window of opportunity. Understanding the context, SNHU set an internal goal of a follow-up phone call within eight and a half minutes. The swift personal response makes prospective students much more likely to choose SNHU.

What obstacles must be removed?
Decisions about a prospect’s financial aid package and how much previous college courses would count toward an SNHU degree were resolved within days instead of weeks or months.