Education today moves from being an altruistic activity to a fully blown industry with professional approach and management. Customer relationship management, it goes without saying is the call of the day Higher Education as well. There are a lot of stakeholders in this industries. Students, parents, teachers, researchers, universities and colleges form a part of this industry as entities.

Higher education is a complex business with diverse needs. It is a combination of universities both low key and elite; catering to a variety of students, right from the fresh out of school, or the ones returning back to studies after sabbaticals or even distant learners.

A CRM for educational institutes needs to be robust enough to cater to the diverse requirements and expectations of its clientele.

Features for CRM for Education Industry

Enrolment Management

Identifying, monitoring and tracking correct prospective students from inquiry, queries, enrolment to completion of course.

• Interaction History
• Correspondence
• Event Attendance
• Admissions Status

Personalization and Profile Building

Prospective student conversion increases with personalized and automated communication. Appropriate profile building help identify students with higher likelihood of enrolment.

Social Media Integration

Social media is the most adopted by the younger generation. Education CRM for better customer management exploits the benefits of this powerful tool to reach and penetrate the market and keep the clients engaged.

Coordinating Events

Scheduling of lectures, classes, workshops and more with reminders to the attendees and the professors should ideally be integrated into the CRM. Feedback modules for students as well as the educators too can be a part of this CRM for Education industry.

Real time Analytics

Insightful dashboards show actionable metrics related to student enrolment, retention and satisfaction besides performance.

Key metrics put on the fingertips of the management helps maintain efficiency of the educators as well as enforce discipline amongst the students. Data visualization using appropriate reports and dashboards based on the assessments and tests provide insights into student progress.

Easily Customizable for Self Service

Self-service is in. An ideal CRM for educational institutes empowers the users to collaborate and manage simple requirements with the DIY tools of the CRM.

Seamless User Experience

The CRM for education industry integrates with all the data repositories to ensure a seamless user experience across devices and platforms

The Benefits of a CRM for Educational Institutes

Making Data Available to All

The chief advantage of a prudent CRM for this industry integrates the data spread over independent departments into one repository. This fosters collaboration between departments and also automates reporting between them.

Digital records of all paper data organized into the CRM along with data introduced from various client touch points like websites, apps and phone calls adds to the comprehensiveness of the data.

Reduces Mundane Work

A CRM captures data from online forms and transfers to the format of choice of the organization. Evaluation reports and other mundane data entry work related to fees processing, feedback and more can be automated or made easier with CRM for education industry. The workforce is thus freed for other tasks.

An Engaging Customer Experience

An Education CRM software offers personalized marketing, with appropriate web presence for segmented audiences. This CRM is the best to run targeted advertisements and other marketing efforts. Automated email campaigns increase awareness and spreads the word through personalization.

This CRM is a common portal for students, alumni, donors and educators and provides a uniform user experiences across devices of choice like desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones or even watches.

CRM for Education Industry at a Reputed Business School in the USA

This award winning Business School offers MBA and other undergraduate management degrees and ranks 14 in the corporate world.

Facts and Figures

• 2 Campuses
• 7000 students enrolled
• 2000 international students from 40 different countries

Challenges of managing records related to

• More than 3,000,000 emails sent till date
• More than 21,000 attendees at events
• Conducted around 11,000 interviews with prospective students
• More than 30,000 conversations over the phone

CRM to the Rescue

The colossal records collected from the various touch points were maintained with the help of traditional tools like spreadsheets and simple databases before the CRM era.

The CRM for education industry not only helped converge this data into a single repository but also added the flexibility of interaction through mobile devices and a comprehensive website. The interdepartmental communications reduced as the data was centralized and available anytime-anywhere.

The most noteworthy advantage of this CRM is that it has increased enrolments simply by offering a solution for identifying and tracking prospective students.

The efficiency, flexibility and integrated approach of the CRM led the Business School to becoming a successfully automated enterprise.

In a Nutshell

Customer Relationship Management principles can be prudently included for the Education Industry using CRM bringing together universities and colleges across the globe and making them visible to a huge set of young and dynamic students through the principles of CRM.

While CRM is widely accepted in the corporate sector, its usage has been limited in higher education. With the ever rising service expectations, institutions need to realign their outlooks to serve students across their entire student life cycle with a professional approach. Continuous adoption of CRM by educational institute users is strongly advocated and is sure to yield benefits to these enterprises.

On a Parting Note

ECRM Solutions offers its diverse, scalable and a one stop solution for customer relationship management keeping in mind the modern day trends with its fully integrated Enterprise Business Mobility eCRM– Renaissance, as a central repository of customer information, insight into customer needs and behavior with a satisfying customer experience across various domains to suit the needs of each.

Visit and request a FREE POC to Test Drive our services.

This blog was originally published on http://ecrmsolutions.co/blog/back-to-school-with-crm-for-education-industry/