What is enrollment CRM and its role in college and university?

Choosing the right CRM for your higher education institute can be an intimidating task. But move further in the journey, and you will realize it is downright expensive as well. But it is the need of the time, and if you know what door to knock on, we are sure you are going to crack a fantastic deal with the right vendor. You see, it is all about finding what is right for you and what are the key players that provide you exactly what you need. So, let’s start our sail toward finding the right CRM solution for a higher ed institution.

What is CRM software?

Customer relationship managementor CRM, is a software solution that has changed the way people manage their communication with internal and external stakeholders. A report from Hubspot showed that implementing the right CRM solution has helped education institutes to improve their revenue by 29% and boosted their conversion rates by 300%. Dreamy, isn’t it? But it is all true; people are living that dream. In fact, there are some other benefits as well associated with CRM software. You can use CRM for:

• Customer Support
• Internal Communication
• Operation Management,

And more.

It is an exceptional tool for cross-team collaboration and streamlining your communication across the organization. It helps you by:

• Centralizing the data across your organization
• Updating data and sharing it in real-time
• Ensuring accuracy in the data and eliminating redundancy
• Streamline your communication
• Automate tasks
• Managing people and profiles, etc.

In summary, CRM solutions in higher education institutes will assist you in unifying data across your organization and managing their contact information. This includes data on all the stakeholders in the system: students, parents, faculty, and administrative staff. Furthermore, a CRM tool has a flexible architecture, which allows you to integrate with a plethora of communication tools to exchange information with stakeholders through different channels. As a result, you would be able to broadcast your message simultaneously via the app (push notifications), SMS, Mail, WhatsApp, and so on.

CRM Software benefits in the admission and enrollment phase

Admissions are one of the busiest times of the year, and it becomes especially hectic if you are still accepting paper-based applications. Not only is managing paper applications difficult, it makes the analysis of data impossible, thus causing you to lose the chance of admitting the right candidates to your institute.

The CRM tool comes into play in many ways in the admission phase. One of the best uses of CRM is centralizing the data and streamlining internal collaboration. With an intuitive system and better process in place, you can manage the admission phase much better, as it allows you to handle inquiries proficiently and improves the applicant’s experience with your organization. Access to real-time data and added features such as marketing and broadcasting services allow you to reach the right audience and ensure a higher admission rate.

Here is a list of things you can do with CRM software in a recruitment cycle:

• Automate lead nurturing
• Find procedural bottlenecks
• Track applications
• Track applicant processes
• Optimize the workflow
• Optimize staff productivity
• Improve student experience
• Personalize communications
• Broadcasting and marketing

Unique features of an enrollment CRM for a college or university

The landscape from K–12 to higher education changes significantly as they have their own unique goals, challenges, and opportunities. And hence, CRM software that is a good solution for a school may not be the best fit for a college or university. Hence, while you are in search of customer relationship management software for a college or university, you should consider the software on the basis of the following points:

1. Customization / Flexibility

It is very important for the CRM system to have a modern and flexible architecture. It would imply that the software allows for greater scalability and multiple integrations. Since CRM software serves as a centralized data repository for many communication tools and marketing software, it becomes necessary that the product allow easy integrations.

2. Pricing / Licensing Cost / Terms

Putting a price tag on the software cost may be tricky. The cost of the software solution varies as per the no. of users, no. of students, tools, and features you need, and what is your payment plan. Also, additional services may influence the final price of the software.

3. Configurability

Configurability is defined as adjusting the elements of the software to change the processes and functions of the product to meet your changing needs. This usually does not require a tech guy, and a person with hands-on experience and authorization to make these changes can do it easily.

4. Other capabilities

Some other important considerations are:

• Cross-device compatibility
• Remote accessibility
• Security features
• Data security and usage compliance
• Access control and permission levels

New-age education ERP comes with in-built CRM solutions

Education ERP is enterprise resource planning software that has been in use for a long time now. They have a gamut of solutions to meet the needs of universities and colleges. They have various modules that automate operations and make management easy. It also helps in streamlining the processes and promotes cross-functional collaboration between academic and administrative departments.

Per se, these software solutions are now coming with in-built capabilities for streamlining inquiry management. Also, since ERP software serves as a centralized data repository and supports operations across the network of digital tools you use in your system, it efficiently eliminates the need of having a separate solution for CRM. For example, Academia ERP software provides in-built solutions for CRM by

1. Centralizing inquiries from multiple sources

Academia ERP enables the centralization of parent/applicant/prospect inquiries from multiple sources. This includes — walk-ins, inbound calls, outbound calls, website, education fair, social media campaigns, other marketing campaigns, and more. The efficient system also eliminates any chances of data duplication and hence ensures accuracy in the workflow.

2. Allocating inquiries to and within the organization

Not only does the system captures the leads it also allocates the leads to concerned people in the organization. It assigns students to the right counselors and based on that, it ensures faster operations and better experience for the applicants. It also helps in easy tracking of the applicant stage and tracking the application process. It also reduces the response time and hence ensures higher query resolution in a short span of time.

3. Powerful campaign management and spent tracking

If you are using multiple tools for marketing during the admission phase, it becomes necessary to track your spending and lead generation from each source. The pre-admission module of the Academia ERP software efficiently does that. It gives you a better understanding of the most profitable channels for lead generation.

4. Real-time tracking: The product provides real-time process tracking to help you better assist your applicants/ prospects. This allows you to provide the correct information to the enquirer and ensure a better user experience with your college/university. Also, it allows easy tracking of fee payments, receipt management, communication tracking, query tracking, and more.

5. Multi-center capabilities

If you are finding a solution for a super admin that needs a toolset to manage admission and enrollment across the organization or a chain of colleges, this is the right solution for you. Academia ERP comes with multi-center capabilities and gives a super admin secure access to all the operations and data of academies/colleges it is responsible for.

Should you get enrollment CRM software?

Not only a CRM software helpful during the enrollment phase of a student lifecycle, but it also helps you boost communication across the organization in the post-admission phase. Hence, it is a good tool that streamlines your communication and marketing operations while automating many pre- and post-admission processes.

But, since there are tools such as Academia ERP, which provides CRM capabilities and other functionality to transform your institute digitally, it may be a more cost-effective solution for your organization.