Proof of Life

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Proof of Life

10/8/2006

With the new customer-oriented technology, Student Lifecycle Management, one vendor is making it easier for schools to give students what they want.

By Matt Villano

Customers are a demanding bunch. Each has different needs and, universally, customers expect top-notch service for the duration of their relationships with a particular company. Sometimes they want a great deal of attention. Other times, they want none. Keeping these desires straight can be challenging for even the smallest organization; for those with thousands of customers, the task can be downright impossible.

Within the past decade, vendors have developed an enterprise-level strategic approach to make this process a little easier. The approach, dubbed Customer Relationship Management (CRM), focuses on creating and maintaining lasting relationships with customers. In the corporate world, the best of these approaches are integrated from one end of a business to the other, including marketing, sales, and service.

In higher education, however, where the only “customers” are students, the notion of managing relationships is a little different. Once colleges and universities create relationships with students, they must nurture them to matriculation and maintain them well beyond that. The end-to-end components of this approach include recruitment, admissions, enrollment, student services, and alumni relations, to name only a handful of functions.

But, for years, colleges and universities interested in CRM were forced to purchase off-the-shelf software packages designed for corporations, and retrofit them for academia. Now CRM strategy has come to higher education, in the form of a strategy known as Student Lifecycle Management, or SLM.

SLM is nothing new; for years, vendors have offered solutions that track customer relationships in specific areas such as recruiting, student services and alumni relations. Today, however, with a new SLM solution from Oracle, colleges and universities can connect with student customers at every point of the lifecycle.

SLM from Oracle, technically known as Enterprise Campus Solutions, is a suite of applications that enables a school to attract the right students, keep them engaged, and stay in touch with them after graduation . All the while, the software culls data. And according to Curtiss Barnes, the vendor’s senior director of industry product strategy, customer institutions can manipulate and utilize that data to gain valuable insights about how to serve their students better over time.

“W hat you are doing with this system is creating a dialogue so you can get a more powerful relationship with each of your users ,” he says, noting that the entire suite d'es not have to be deployed to achieve this result; schools can sign up for different modules and deploy them as needed. “When that relationship gets stronger, everybody benefits—both the student and the school.”