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Focus

Think '360'

3/1/2007

By Rama Ramaswami

When it comes to CRM, higher ed institutions are bypassing traditional offerings in favor of targeted solutions that provide an up-close, all-encompassing view of student interactions.

NO LONGER DO universities have to decide between off-the-shelf and custom programs, or between standalone constituent relationship management (CRM) applications and ERP-integrated solutions. Instead, today’s mantra is “360”—an upclose, 360-degree view of student interactions. Whether the processes and technologies employed to achieve this are called constituent interaction management, e-mail management, content management, or any combination thereof, administrators are looking for systems that enable them to monitor individual interactions throughout a student’s lifecycle with the institution. And the solutions universities choose rarely are traditional CRM programs that work alone or within an enterprise application; increasingly, colleges and universities are turning to third-party vendors to find more nimble programs that are highly targeted to the needs of a specific institution, department, or even course offering.

Making It Personal

At Kansas State University, administrators were looking for a system that would go beyond traditional, static CRM, and give admissions staffers more versatile tools to attract students. According to Jan Elsasser, associate director of admissions and technology at KSU, because higher ed institutions operate in a “highly competitive market for students,” schools are looking to grab students’ attention with personalized technology such as podcasts, personalized e-mails, and highly targeted content based on their interests. “A lot of institutions have customized their ERP systems for this purpose,” Elsasser says, noting that such customization is not always an option for every school. “It depends on whether you have the time and resources [to optimize your existing ERP system]. If you want to put in the time, modifications can make it work, but our ERP didn’t come out of the box as robust as we would have liked.” The CRM component of the KSU’s existing student management system “really didn’t meet our needs for recruiting,” says Elsasser. “We had been processing data on a mainframe that was not designed around a recruiting system.”

In February 2006, the school implemented Talisma’s Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) CRM solution, a highly configurable, internet-based system that includes e-mail, chat, self-service, and other channels of contact with constituents. According to Dan Vetras, president and CEO of Talisma, the program “offers a 360-degree view of historical as well as real-time interactions with students, and can funnel the data into an existing back-office environment, whether that be a traditional CRM or ERP system. Every interaction that has occurred is visible.” For KSU, this deep insight into interactions has proven invaluable because it enables highly personalized service. For instance, Elsasser says, during a marketing campaign, the system allows administrators to sidestep generic copy. “Instead, it pushes targeted content to existing constituents or prospects, based on the information those individuals have already provided.” She notes that the system’s highly proactive and flexible chat function is another benefit. “It can be configured so that if a prospect is on a web page for longer than, say, 30 seconds, it triggers a chat event with a live college representative.”

Empowering the Recruitment Office

The University of Alabama, another Talisma customer, is somewhat further along with its use of the same application, which the school installed in November 2005 after a two-year search for a comprehensive constituent management suite. Says Teri Terry, director of technology support services in the university’s Office of Enrollment Management, “We have 400,000 records in our system. We were looking for a provider that had everything to offer in one package; whose representatives didn’t tell us, ‘It’s in the next release.’” Terry found that the Talisma solution offers myriad channels and opportunities for customer contact, including phone, e-mail, a portal, web chat, telecounseling, and, in its most recent release, event registration. It affords the university insight into all interactions with students, and “recruiters enjoy it,” she says. “They can see every phone conversation with the office; every e-mail and every conversation with the counselor. It empowers the recruiter.”

The cost of the system varies, depending on whether customers purchase a point solution or the whole suite. But for Terry, the true return on investment (ROI) lies in the value of the business intelligence she receives. “We can track where we’re spending our money, from application to admission, from suspect [someone who may have expressed a slight interest in attending the university, but is not yet a real prospect] to prospect. It’s a huge source of information that we didn’t have before. For example, if an event is not yielding enough student enrollment, we can cut down on the number of times we do it. It enables us to see what’s successful and what’s not.”

Currently, administrators are in data-gathering mode for the university’s first full recruitment season using the new system. “We’re fine-tuning and using more and more of it as we go along,” Terry says.

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