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1. Case for Student Lifecycle CRM in Colleges and Universities

2. CASE FOR STUDENT LIFECYCLE CRM IN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES | 2 Why do colleges and universities need a student lifecycle CRM? Relationships serve as the essential foundation of colleges and universities, arguably more than any other industry. During the development of students throughout their journey from admissions to enrolment, class start to graduation, and as a lifelong alumni, stakeholders across the institution engage them through individual touch points, creating profoundly meaningful and productive relationships. Stakeholders include admission counsellors, advisors, faculty members, student services, career coaches, and advancement teams. A student who has a good experience carries it with her, cherishing good feelings about the institution throughout her life, which has a naturally positive effect on the institution’s standing and reputation. In many ways, a student’s relationship with his college or university is one of the most enduring, and valuable, representing one of the largest financial investments made with nothing but positive things to look forward to at that stage in one’s life. Colleges and universities that recognise the significance of these relationships will reap the benefits of this strategic asset to continuously embellish their brand equity and build a strong institution for the long term. Several recent research studies reveal that a number of colleges and universities globally plan to make a substantial investment in student lifecycle CRM solutions by acquiring the right technology to record, track, and continuously improve the student experience and overall lifecycle management. What is the most effective implementation strategy? Colleges and universities, over the years, have been resorting to implementation of CRM solutions, operating in silos, to find efficiencies in how they communicate with prospective students and applicants, execute marketing campaigns, manage service requests, and identify students at risk of dropping out, among others. While these point CRM solutions do offer some valuable views and results in incremental staff efficacies, they unfortunately fall way short of connecting the dots in the student journey. Besides, they naturally lack the ability to offer deeper insights for continuous improvement in institutional goals and initiatives to recruit and retain the right students, and to intuitively engage and serve the student population in a customised, one-on-one manner. Thus, while department-led loose implementations of CRMs do serve a few short-term goals, they fall extremely short of institutional goals that can only be fulfilled by strategic campus-led lifecycle CRM implementations. While most institutions recognise the considerable potential of student lifecycle CRM implementations, progress towards campuswide initiatives have been limited. As a result student engagement points remain largely disconnected, stymieing institutions' ability to foster lifelong student relationships. Only a campuswide CRM implementation to recruit students, foster student success, and create lifelong relationships with alumni will ultimately leverage insights from those relationships to deliver a more data-driven, intentional, and personalised student experience.

3. CASE FOR STUDENT LIFECYCLE CRM IN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES | 3 Thus campuswide implementations are going to be in the realm of possibilities for forward-looking institutions with a specific set of attributes, goals, and capabilities, and a willingness to be bold trailblazers to put themselves on a path to student lifecycle management. Though department-led implementations have already been underway in most colleges and universities, campuswide initiatives may begin simultaneously, building long-term institutional capacity to manage student experience more strategically. It does not have to be an inflexible "one or the other" scenario but a journey of continuous transformation. Though the journey may be a challenging one, early adopters may find the journey worth embarking on to create both a potentially transformational student experience and improved institutional outcomes. Who will be the internal ‘catalysts’? Change management shifts from being a siloed activity to an all-pervasive activity to achieve the overarching goal of a campus-wide CRM strategy, which is to facilitate, ease, and even transform, the interactions among students, faculty, administrators, staff, mentors, employers, among others, to improve institutional services on a continuous basis. Consequently, the first area of focus for any campuswide CRM initiative must be on the people who will bring it to life. A broad range of campus stakeholders will influence success or failure, and of course, an executive sponsor is essential for success. Identifying a stakeholder community with campuswide CRM is relatively straightforward, but building the community could be challenging as they all have to be drawn from beyond departmental borders. An inventory of all the interaction points an institution has with students, from the first enquiry as prospects all the way to an annual fund donation as alumni, would be massive. This will include a wide array of departments such as marketing, admissions, advising, financial aid, academic affairs, student services, residential life, IT services, advancement office, among others. Without question, building consensus with such a large and diverse set of stakeholders with lack of established processes and structures, varied departmental priorities, specificity in language used, and conflicting objectives, may all make it difficult to find common ground. Nevertheless, a campuswide strategy has to soldier on and plug away to bring these stakeholders together by building cross-departmental pathways and brainstorming, all aimed at creating student centricity. How does one identify the right software solution? Cloud-readiness of the software product is critical as more and more colleges and universities stand on the precipice of migration to the cloud. The current role of the IT department at institutions is rapidly changing with the increasing acquisition of cloud-based software products and easy subscription for use by business users, empowering those users to go live quickly and to pretty much configure those products exactly in tune with their needs.

4. CASE FOR STUDENT LIFECYCLE CRM IN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES | 4 As the institution implements campuswide platforms for student engagement across the lifecycle, the CRM solution must connect with a number of solutions such as the SIS, the LMS, and in some cases the ERP . The CRM should be able to provide a real time rich ‘360 student view’ of student experience, progress, transactions, status, etc. drawn from disparate sources. “One size doesn't fit all” when it comes to communicating and dealing with prospects, students or alumni. The campuswide CRM should have the ability to create a persona for each prospective student group (international, veteran, disabled etc.), student group (online, adult, research student etc.), and alumni group (corporate employee, entrepreneur, researcher etc.). The system should set up unique communication journey for each persona. Disseminate persona-based content specific to each student, and automate actions (polls, appointments, service tickets, reminders etc.), and view analytics by persona to compare relative progress of each persona. Such targeted communication is guaranteed to make the student feel touched and reassure her that she is dealing with the right institution. Trailblazing educational institutions globally have adopted the mantra “Treat your student like a customer” as they have clearly understood that a singularly student-centric approach is a critical need in order to be competitive, and to help achieve student success. Creating a two-way communication with students is an imperative for student engagement and needless to say, channels of communication have changed with the advent of smartphones. Mobile apps for student engagement are no longer a wish, but a need, as they have assumed centre stage for student service, engagement, well-being, retention, and success. Colleges and universities ought to seek out CRM solutions that are able to flex and grow with changing business needs. While this is a difficult characteristic, it is important to look for CRM vendors who have a track record of partnering with institutions to build the product with large doses of user injected ideas and also the innovativeness to go above and beyond today’s business processes and needs. Institutions should also look for solutions with robust capacity for configuration, an assortment of best practices learnt from experiential means rather than having to customise the baseline code. Institutions should also keep costs and timelines in clear view while embarking on this journey. There are expensive CRM platforms built primarily for businesses available in the market that need extensive buildouts and customisations to make it work for educational institutions. Research will easily reveal that these solutions would be long-winded, prohibitively expensive, and in many cases a failure because of constantly changing internal stakeholders given the length of the project, quite often working with inexperienced SI partners. Many institutions have abandoned such projects after persisting for a while, not only because of serious cost overrun but also because the project never really seem to accomplish what the business users want. There is an unprecedented level of disruption facing colleges and universities, coupled with rapidly shifting preferences of students. Institutions should assume that what they require of their CRM solution will change profoundly over the next decade and hence must find a CRM software solution that is technologically and functionally future-proofed, but sufficiently meets their business needs today.

5. What a cloud-based Student Lifecycle CRM looks like MobileApp/Portal All resources on an institution-branded Mobile App Prospects Students Alumni Recruitment CRM Retention CRM Alumni CRM • Capture all enquiries • Manage applications • Campaigns to nurture • Increase conversion • Student engagement platform • Early alerts & 360 student view • Confidential case management • Career hub for student success • Alumni to mentor students • Help institutional fundraising • Event participation • Connect with other Alumni About Us Engage2Serve (e2s) is a global provider of Student Lifecycle CRMs for higher and further education. Our product suite optimises how institutions engage and serve diverse student populations using the powerful portals and mobile apps for students and staff members. Together we help you build meaningful, personalised relationships with students, guiding them through the entire student lifecycle journey via digital empowerment and best practices that enhance recruitment, student success, and advancement. Learn more at www.engage2serve.com Engage2Serve Inc. Email: info@engage2serve.com www.engage2serve.com