As digital transformation continues to reshape industries, one sector that is rapidly adopting new technologies is education. With students increasingly expecting personalized, seamless experiences, educational institutions are under pressure to innovate and adapt quickly to meet these rising needs and expectations.

One company that’s spearheading this change is Rubeus, a leading Independent Software Vendor (ISV) specializing in optimizing student acquisition, retention, and relationship management.

With over a decade of experience in the Brazilian education market, Rubeus is leveraging technology to drive student engagement and success.

At the heart of this innovation is their strategic partnership with Infobip. By integrating into our conversational experience platform, together we’re helping educational institutions elevate their communication strategies and drive student loyalty to a whole new level.

We spoke with Matheus Amaral, Co-Founder and CPO at Rubeus, to understand how this collaboration is redefining student engagement in Brazil’s educational sector.

The biggest challenges facing ISVs in Brazil

Independent Service Vendors (ISVs) face unique challenges in Brazil, with a highly competitive market and notably high operational costs. In general, ISVs face several common challenges in their go-to-market strategy, including:

• Cost optimization: Rising capital and operational costs, along with limited visibility into spending, make it difficult to optimize expenses.
• Aging infrastructure: Outdated systems can impact performance and lead to high maintenance costs, requiring costly updates to remain competitive.
• Security & compliance: Strict regulations, rising cyber threats, and complex audits can strain security and compliance efforts, especially with decentralized security.
• Scalability & flexibility: Vendor lock-in and seasonal peak demands make it hard to scale and find room to grow, especially with limited standby capacity.

Despite these obstacles, Rubeus has remained resilient. According to Matheus, consistency is the key to success in Brazil’s tough environment for ISVs.

This focus on persistence and quality has allowed Rubeus to grow and become a trusted partner for educational institutions looking to improve their student engagement strategies.

Redefining student engagement with conversational solutions

Rubues is using our chatbot-building platform, cloud contact center, and customer data platform (CDP) to enhance communication with students, providing a seamless experience across multiple channels like WhatsApp and SMS.

By integrating Infobip’s conversational experience platform with Rubeus, educational institutions can redefine their student engagement while efficiently managing student relationships, automating workflows, and ensuring timely communication.

Here’s how the complete integration works:

1. Start a conversation: A student reaches out to the educational institution via WhatsApp chatbot built through Answers to inquire about their registration status or resolve an issue.
2. Consult the Rubeus platform: The bot pulls up the student’s data from Rubeus to provide an accurate and personalized response. If the student is a new contact, the bot registers them into the system through People CDP.
3. Response based on data: Depending on the student’s data, the bot provides the necessary information or redirects them to a live agent through Conversations if needed. All interactions are logged in Rubeus for future reference.
4. Overflow to conversations: If the chatbot cannot resolve the issue, it escalates the conversation to the cloud contact center, ensuring that the student gets the help they need, while the institution’s team can focus on other tasks.

Measuring success: focus on client satisfaction and enrollment

For Rubeus, the key metric of success isn’t just client satisfaction—it’s about seeing tangible outcomes.

Matheus emphasized the importance of tracking the effectiveness of their communication strategies by monitoring conversations, engagement, and ultimately, enrollment rates.

“Client satisfaction is our primary goal. But when it comes to measuring the business impact, we focus on the number of enrollments. We track how many conversations are initiated after sending mass messages, and how many of those interactions ultimately result in student enrollments,” said Matheus.

This data-driven approach ensures that Rubeus can continually optimize their solutions, improving the experience for both educational institutions and their students.

The future of communication: GenAI and RCS

Looking to the future, Rubeus sees significant opportunities for further innovation, particularly through the use of Generative AI (GenAI) and Rich Communication Services (RCS).

“GenAI will be a game-changer for ISVs like us. We see the potential to enhance our tools, improve productivity, and connect our applications in new and smarter ways. RCS is also on our roadmap for next year. It’s a new channel with great potential in Brazil, and we’re excited to integrate it into our platform,” Matheus explained.

These technologies will play a crucial role in shaping the next stage of communication for the education sector. Rubeus aims is to simplify the omnichannel experience for their clients.

“The process of implementing omnichannel solutions can be time-consuming and expensive. We want to make it easier for educational institutions to connect with students across all channels, providing a seamless experience,” Matheus added.

Two game-changing use Cases: Claretiano and ESAMC

Rubeus’ partnership with Infobip has already delivered impressive results for educational institutions across Brazil. Two use cases stand out: Claretiano and ESAMC.

Rubeus and Infobip: Empowering the education sector to drive student engagement and loyalty

Rubeus’ partnership with Infobip is a great example of how collaboration can lead to transformative results. By combining Rubeus’ deep knowledge of the education sector with our conversational customer experience solutions, we’ve created a platform that not only simplifies student engagement but also drives real business outcomes.

Together, we’re excited to continue co-creating groundbreaking conversational solutions that drive student acquisition, engagement and satisfaction in Brazil’s education sector.