UniQuest was founded in 2013, so this year we celebrate our 10th birthday. Rachel Fletcher, CEO of UniQuest and Co-Founder (with Natalie Letcher), reflects on the last ten years…
It’s been a decade since we launched UniQuest – luckily we didn’t go with (F)Letcher as the business name, which was my co-founder Natalie Letcher’s original suggestion, as I’m not sure how anyone would have approached pronouncing it! But the Fletcher/Letcher last name confusion has nonetheless been a source of much hilarity and mistaken identity over the years. If you’re one of the people who has at some point emailed the wrong one of us, don’t feel bad, you’re not alone!
In 2013 we set out to build a market-leading student engagement service to improve the experience for prospective students, and support institutions who had – and continue to have – a huge appetite to adapt more quickly to changing technology and respond to the changing needs of students. We wanted to help drive this change, at pace, in the higher education sector.
We like doing things brilliantly and ensuring our clients love us – it’s always been an underpinning tenet of how we approach everything we do and I think is borne out by the strength and longevity of our partnerships. We’ve never lost sight of that goal. Natalie and I have remained integrally involved, but with leadership and support from a team of which we’re incredibly proud.
If we fast-forward a decade, we’ve grown considerably. We’ve worked with over 75 universities and managed over two million student journeys. Our work has resulted in 270,000+ enrolments for our partners, and over £3.3bn in tuition fees! In the detail, what enables that is a load of highly effective, technology-enabled, human-enhanced interactions – whether that’s 108 multi-channel communications back and forth to support an international postgraduate student across the three years it might take them to finalise their plans, or 18 WhatsApp conversations with a domestic undergraduate student in the immediate lead-up to the intake.
We’ve launched new solutions to help our partners take transformative leaps in managing all parts of the student journey – often co-creating these solutions with our partners. From the introduction of highly interactive email design and testing tools to transform collaboration between us and our partners, to the creation of an intelligent applicant screening tool that reduces the workload on admissions teams by 50%.
We’ve built our global workforce, during a pandemic, to over 300 people, with teams in the UK, US, Manila and Bangalore. We’ve grown fast, but most importantly responsibly – as a secure and sustainable business, looking after our employees thoughtfully, and continuing to provide a robust foundation for our partners, with the ability to adapt to meet rapidly changing market demands and conditions.
We’re incredibly proud of how far we’ve come, and over the course of the coming weeks and months will be reflecting on some of the key milestones in our journey, shared by partners and our team. I hope you join us for some of this!