Four Corporate Voices: Customer Relationship Management

Authors:
Andy Clark, Abe Gruber, Lawrence Levy, Doug Anstoetter, Nathalie Mainland and Dennis Thibeault
Published:
Monday, July 27, 2020
min read

The EDUCAUSE Enterprise IT Program asked four corporate members to share their advice about implementing customer relationship management systems in higher education, including critical features, required culture change, and privacy concerns that will need to be addressed for success.

Block letters: CRM with people in front of and on top of the letters connecting via computer
Credit: Julia Lazebnaya / Shutterstock.com © 2020

The EDUCAUSE Enterprise IT Program publishes materials focused on the program's five themes of analytics, governance and relationship management, technology strategy, IT cost and value, and business process management. At many institutions, especially in today's environment, easily getting and staying connected with students is critical. We set out to gather expert insights into how institutions might implement and use CRMs and their features as a strategic asset to help them

  • easily engage with their students,
  • answer important organizational questions, and
  • improve their institution's ability to make information-based decisions.

We reached out to four corporate members—TargetX, Enrollment Rx, Salesforce.org, and Unifyed—and asked leaders within them for their guidance, advice, and ideas about how institutions can best plan for successful CRM implementation. Their answers to some key questions follow.

Vital Features of CRM for Higher Education

When selecting a new or implementing a replacement CRM, what are the 5–10 most critical features to consider and why?

Abe Gruber: A modern CRM must support staff needs, without sacrificing the student experience. The top five features I would look for are:

  • A great mobile experience, for students and staff: Especially with staff and students at home—and in some cases with limited access to a computer—mobile-friendly doesn't cut it anymore. Mobile-first is where things are today, and it's here to stay for the foreseeable future.
  • Robust reporting and easy-to-access data visualizations: These tools empower your staff to make data-driven decisions without a lot of manual work from IT. Modern CRMs provide institutions with self-service reporting tools along with visualizations based on best practices from across higher education.
  • Multi-channel communication tools for student engagement: The ability to quickly and easily connect communication results to other interactions in your CRM is really important for targeted outreach, successful relationship building, and ROI analysis.
  • The ability to extend the CRM solution to meet future needs: This can be accomplished through configurability, customization, or add-on applications (similar to a smart phone). Institutions should understand the ways in which a CRM can be flexible enough to meet today's needs while also being able to handle tomorrow's technology.
  • And finally, not quite a feature, but more of a critical component when considering a CRM is whether your CRM comes with a managed implementation. Finding a trusted partner who can share their expertise through your implementation is key, and having confidence that your partner will provide ongoing support and guidance based on best practices is crucial to long-term success and adoption. Bonus points for partners with personal experience working in higher education because they often can better relate to your circumstances and offer tailored advice and best practices throughout your implementation.

Lawrence Levy and Doug Anstoetter:

  • Scalability across the student life cycle: Evaluate a new CRM in the context of your overall technology strategy. Institutions should select a mature solution that is focused on a specific area (such as recruitment and admissions) but is built on a platform that can scale across the student life cycle. This provides for a future-proof strategy that doesn't include disparate systems, thus resulting in an easier CRM environment to maintain.
  • "Clicks not code" configuration: Your teams should be able to accomplish most tasks without relying on IT professionals. A CRM should rely on "clicks not code" configurations so that system administrators can change program requirements, create new user interfaces, and alter the processes that make your institution run.
  • Integration capabilities: The right CRM should integrate with your student information system and other enterprise systems. It will have a user-friendly interface for importing data sources such as test score lists, third-party admission applications, and more. Finally, a CRM with a strong app market and ecosystem of partners will allow your institution to scale and overcome future challenges by connecting it with both old and new technologies.
  • Higher ed expertise: Work with a CRM partner that understands the complexities of higher education and can bring best practices to each deployment. A company focused on higher education can bring the ideas and feedback of other client institutions back to the CRM, improving the technology and honing it for the specific needs that are unique to higher ed.
  • Implementation: A new CRM system requires a comprehensive deployment that should include thorough discovery, followed by extensive configuration and testing, training for administrators and end users, and go-live stabilization support. An experienced CRM company should provide a well-defined scope of work with clear deliverables that characterize success.

Nathalie Mainland: An effective CRM supports your vision now and in the future from a campus-wide level. As you evaluate solutions, ask yourself whether the proposed CRM meets that expectation. For example, investing in a product to address recruiting and admissions can certainly lead to success, but without thinking about wider campus needs you're missing out on providing valuable insights for advisors and student service teams once the student is enrolled. Next, choose a CRM that will evolve along with your institution. Platforms with open APIs and open data models that can install new applications from a third-party ecosystem are particularly flexible. Finally, as you evaluate CRM solutions, assess whether the vendor offers ways to connect with experts and peers for information. Then, ensure that the vendor is gathering those insights and using them to enhance its capabilities. Top CRM companies gather insights and feedback from a variety of sources to ensure they stay ahead of customer needs.

Dennis Thibeault:

  • CRMs for collegesmust be designed for higher ed: CRMs that exist for general use within any industry can be difficult to fit into a higher education environment. That approach often requires extensive training and/or a technical resource.
  • CRMs must be easy to use: An effective CRM must allow end users to easily build their rules and manage the way the CRM communicates with constituents without requiring technical expertise.
  • CRMs must be configurable: One size never fits all; a CRM should allow different users to use the application differently and meet their business requirements.
  • CRMs must be personal: This includes providing the right communication to the right people at the right time by using the available data.
  • CRMs must be flexible: The CRM must be able to send the distinct messaging required for your prospects and applicants via email/text messages.
  • CRMs must be inclusive: A CRM must be embedded within the institution's other products. An admissions counselor should be able to see communications within the application processing system, while academic advisors/registrars should be able to view the communication for a student within their student information system.
  • CRMs must provide analytics: Monitoring and measuring the results of your communications allow you to focus on the most effective communications and improve those that are less effective.

Changing the Culture around CRM

What guidance would you offer to help organizations recognize and address the cultural change required for successful CRM use?

Gruber: The first step to getting buy-in is including your stakeholders and end-users in the decision-making process. Too many times we've seen IT offices make a siloed decision about a CRM, only to be met with major opposition from their admissions or student success teams (and vice versa). This stalls projects from the get-go, and it's hard to regain trust from these offices or get them excited when they feel the decision was made without them in mind. The purpose of a CRM is to support communication across departments, and your CRM buying process and implementation should mirror that. The second step is identifying clear priorities and principles for how the CRM should be used and establish that upfront. This will help guide your decision-making processes throughout the implementation and beyond. And finally, as you think about how to roll out the CRM to staff, faculty, and students, do any employee resources need to be created/updated, and are you prepared to conduct training on a regular basis?

Levy and Anstoetter:

  • Audit and assess: Begin with an assessment to understand how staff perform their jobs and what their concerns are for the project. Is there redundancy? Are there opportunities to automate? Are there, dare we ask, secret spreadsheets? Make sure you understand what the current processes are, how they can be improved, and how the teams feel about them.
  • Find the right people: Identify key resources in admission, marketing, IT, and other groups who might need to participate in the CRM project. Make sure your project team and/or vendor have the right technical skills for system integration and data migration. An internal project manager will keep things organized, make decisions, and "herd cats" when necessary. This person should be the point of contact responsible for ensuring all client parties meet deadlines and make decisions beneficial to the overall project. They should be able to push back when needed, drive consensus, and make final decisions.
  • Get everyone on the same page: Teams from your institution and the vendor are likely involved in the CRM engagement. Consider the following questions regarding these teams: Who negotiated the contract, and who has the scope of work for the project? Does your project team know what is in-scope versus out-of-scope? Are the vendor's sales and implementation teams on the same page regarding the scope of work? Early meetings with a comprehensive kickoff call can keep everyone on the same page and prevent unrealistic expectations on both sides.
  • Be vigilant and flexible managing the project: Internal project meetings help cultivate relationships with all the constituents that will be part of the project. Identify not only the roles of each team member but also the right channels of communication. Set deadlines that are aggressive but realistic. Understand when deliverables are due, but leave a buffer for the unexpected.

Mainland: Successful CRM use requires partnership and adoption from the entire institution. The right CRM seamlessly unifies disparate business systems and automates much of the manual work and paper processes that might exist. However, this requires transparency and accountability for users of those legacy systems and the data within them. It's important to get buy-in from teams using or supporting the system. Cross-functional groups need to feel comfortable collaborating and sharing information. To do this effectively, bring teams together to establish guidelines. Host brainstorming sessions where teams can consider how they'll share information. Allow them to be a part of strategy and data governance processes. Also, from the moment data is collected, it's critical that it's accurate, current, and analyzed for trends and insights. Each team should play a part in ensuring a thoughtful strategy for data hygiene.

Thibeault: CRMs provide a unique opportunity to greatly improve and automate your messaging. Many older systems rely on a manual approach that results in extra work, last-minute stress, and potentially missed opportunities. Consider all the communications that are sent manually today—automate them  and you will have much more time to focus on the personal needs of your customers. As a result, you should be able to improve your conversion rates. In addition, CRMs automate your communications, freeing your workers to focus on other aspects of their job. As a result, you can lower stress while improving productivity. Finally, CRMs communicate in multiple ways. Using text messaging, email, scheduled calls, paper mailings, or face-to-face meetings, you can easily communicate in a variety of ways and reduce internal overhead as well as costs.

Privacy Issues with CRM

What privacy concerns do you see associated with the data collection required to support CRM use in higher education?

Gruber: Nearly every CRM has functionality that supports HIPAA, FERPA, and GDPR compliance, so the biggest challenge is making sure your staff is trained on how to be compliant and ensuring that they understand the part they each play in the security of the data in your CRM. And make sure you select a solution that has robust security controls and a proven track record of security—one that allows you to limit access only to the data that a staff member should be able to see. For instance, work-study students should not be able to access student records during off-business hours or through their personal phone, and someone from the English department shouldn't be able to access financial aid information for an engineering student. Most modern CRMs will have functionality built in, but it's always good to ask and verify.

Levy and Anstoetter: Privacy regulations such as FERPA and GDPR are of paramount importance to higher education institutions. The CRM platform must support extensive governance controls in order to enforce data accessibility compliance. Additionally, as the CRM scales across the institution, the profiles and permissions within the system should be easily adapted to new user roles. Further, the controls should be configurable and modifiable by administrators, regardless of technical expertise. As it pertains to managing application review and admissions decisions, governance controls are key. For example, an engineering professor might be one member of the school of engineering's admission committee. While this professor might need to view and score the application, this person should only have access to certain information about the applicant. The right CRM will allow you to control what an application reviewer can access and score within each student record. These controls should be easily configurable by an administrator with mouse clicks.

Mainland: Data protection is an asset to your institution's strategy, not just a regulatory burden. To establish trust and safety of data, gather relevant stakeholders and come up with a clear and actionable data strategy. Decide which users and processes have access to certain data, and put those governing ideas in writing. Then, understand how a CRM vendor prioritizes data trust and transparency, and make sure its core values align with yours. Also, evaluate how a vendor configures its platform to protect sensitive data. Determine what customizations are available to ensure the platform can support your specific data access use cases. Finally, make sure that you trust your vendor's ability to maintain secure infrastructure and processes that protect your data.

Thibeault: FERPA, HIPAA, and other rules and regulations govern how data can be collected and used. The CRM you select should comply with all the government rules and regulations and ensure that the users have options for opting into or out of certain types of communication. Access to communications—text messages, email, logs of phone calls or face-to-face meetings, and copies of paper mailings—should be secured. Individual access should be available via role-based access control. Security and privacy are critical. Hosted solutions are often the best, since your applications should be in secure facilities using the latest software security architecture to help protect your data from cyberattacks.

Growing Maturity of CRM

What additional recommendations or advice do you have for institutions working to increase their CRM maturity?

Gruber: Thinking "big picture" is the best way to consider what's next for your CRM. Often institutions start with "This is the tool we have, so what can we do with it?" rather than "This is what we want to do; is this the right tool for it?" Knowing what the strategy is, based on information from your stakeholders, can help inform the decisions you make regarding your CRM. In addition, perform annual reviews of your CRM (and your whole tech stack while you're at it). Take advantage of things like annual health checks with your vendor or set stakeholder meetings to reevaluate priorities and see how you're tracking to goals.

Levy and Anstoetter: Invest in your CRM team's education of the selected platform. The best CRM platforms offer extensive certification and training opportunities to expand your internal knowledge base and expertise. The most successful institutions are the ones that truly recognize the wisdom of having focused CRM administration personnel for this vital enterprise technology. Develop a Center for Excellence that is a collaborative group on campus to manage the implementation and continued CRM success. A Center of Excellence is an employee-led, cross-functional group of people within your organization. The purpose of such a group is to provide the space to discuss and collaborate on large-scale concepts, granular ideas, tools, and solutions. This collaborative approach leads to the sharing of proven practices and ensures that the mission and vision of the project are being accomplished.

Mainland: As your CRM use evolves, it's important to always think about your long-term goals. Make sure your goals define your strategy. Then, take some time to evaluate organizations—from across various sectors—that you see as inspirational. Think about who has delighted you as a consumer and consider how they've used technology to deliver those experiences. What institutions do you see as having progressive engagement strategies or innovative technology uses? Once you've identified those, do what higher education does best and learn from your peers! If you're able to quickly connect with a customer community that uses your chosen CRM, ask questions on how to start the journey or take your capabilities further. There's a good chance that another institution was in your same shoes at some point.

Thibeault: Be open minded. Rethink every communication you do and ask yourself:

  • Is it effective, and does it provide the "right" message?
  • Is it personalized?
  • Is it sent at the right time via the right communication method?

Be sure that the recipient can reply to the messages and those replies be stored within the CRM. Also, be sure your staff can use their cell phones to communicate via email with a constituent and still have the message stored within the CRM.

Make a comprehensive list of all the communication you might do with each constituency group. Consider the following:

  • Make a spreadsheet of all potential messages.
  • Group messages by campaigns to help you organize them. For example, all nursing prospects, or all international.
  • Decide whom exactly the message should go to (i.e., what criteria will be used to define the group to which any individual message will be sent?). Decide when the message should be delivered. Decide where/how the message should be delivered. Should it be paper mail, e-mail, text message, or a phone call? Decide why this message is important.
  • Make your rules flexible so that they can be reused year after year.

Additional Resources

Gruber:

Levy and Anstoetter:

Mainland:

Thibeault: We have built an AI-powered cloud-based admission and recruitment CRM for higher ed. A few of our clients are Westcliff University, Camden County College, Oklahoma Wesleyan University. Learn more at "AI-Based Student Admissions & Recruiting CRM for Higher Education."

Andrew Clark is Enterprise IT Program Manager at EDUCAUSE.

Abe Gruber is Sr. Account Executive and Solutions Architect at TargetX.

Lawrence Levy is CEO of Enrollment Rx.

Doug Anstoetter is Sales Enablement Specialist of Enrollment Rx.

Nathalie Mainland is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Education Cloud, Salesforce.org.

Dennis Thibeault is Chief Product Officer at Unifyed.

© 2020 Andrew Clark, Abe Gruber, Lawrence Levy, Doug Anstoetter, Nathalie Mainland, and Dennis Thibeault.