How Smart Automation Reclaims Professionals’ Time for Student Aftercare – STC Rotterdam
📌 The Challenge of Ensuring a Soft Landing
STC (Scheepvaart en Transport College) in the Netherlands faced a logistical and legal challenge when national legislation was updated. Under Dutch law, educational institutions are now required to monitor and support certain students for a full year after graduation. This mandate aims to ensure a sustainable integration into the labor market and a soft landing in the working life, specifically preventing graduates from falling out of the system shortly after receiving their diplomas.
Ad Ruinard, Policy Advisor and Team Manager Support Team of STC, explains: the goal is to provide a safety net during a demanding transition:
“We have to follow them for a year after they have their diploma to make sure they have a sustainable integration on the labor market and to prevent them from falling out again.”
✖️ Limitations of Traditional Manual Outreach
Previously, STC managed this requirement through a manual call center approach, with staff members attempting to reach around one hundred graduates via telephone during standard business hours. This method proved exceptionally time-consuming and costly. It also resulted in frequent timing misalignments, as graduates working their new jobs were often unable to answer calls between 9:00 and 17:00. In fact, only 40 % of the students were reached, meaning 60% were left unreached.
Beyond logistical hurdles, the team encountered a significant barrier in the quality of communication. Joost Markus, a Student Coach, noted that phone calls often failed to elicit honest responses:
“When you are calling, you are a total stranger to them. Sometimes you get socially desirable, politically correct answers instead of the truth.”
When a student is surprised by a phone call, the threshold for discussing genuine struggles remains high.
📲 A Low-Threshold Solution via WhatsApp
To address these barriers, STC piloted Annie Advisor to transition the first point of contact to WhatsApp. Instead of an intrusive phone call, students receive a low-threshold message from the chatbot that they can answer at their own convenience. This digital approach provides students with a sense of control and the necessary time to reflect on their situation.
The results from the initial pilot were immediate. 94 % of students received the message, making it a 135 % increase to the manual approach. The response rate reached 50%, surpassing the success of manual calling. Thaïsa de Windt, a Project Manager who handles student aftercare, observed that the chatbot created a safer space for honesty:
“They are not pushed to give an answer at that specific moment. They have their own time to react and think about it.”
In one instance, a graduate used the bot to flag their need for a sparring session regarding career decisions. This alert enabled a staff member to step in and facilitate a personal guidance discussion that likely would have remained unaddressed through traditional phone outreach.
💜 Enhancing Human Connection Through Automation
A core principle of the Annie Advisor implementation is that the bot does not replace the professional staff. Instead, it serves as a signaling tool to identify which students require human intervention. Ad Ruinard emphasizes that technology is a bridge to better personal contact:
“This is not a substitute for contact, but especially an instrument to signal problems. It is a helping tool, not a substitute tool.”
By automating routine data collection and initial check-ins, staff members can reallocate time previously wasted on unsuccessful call attempts toward direct, high-quality support. The team summarizes the benefits clearly.
“The time you save in calling the students, you can invest in supporting the students. It is actually quite simple.”
🫶 Preventing Dropout Through Attendance Monitoring
Building on the success of the aftercare pilot, STC is expanding the use of Annie Advisor to monitor student attendance, as high absence rates are a primary predictor of early school leaving. The goal is to identify the underlying causes of absence – whether they are motivational issues or deeper personal crises, before a student drops out entirely.
Ad Ruinard outlines the vision for this proactive approach:
“We want to know the real reason for the absence. We have our assumptions, but we don’t know exactly. Annie helps us get those answers so we can spend more time supporting the students who really need it.”
By lowering the threshold for asking for help, STC ensures that technical automation directly supports the human mission of the school.
