The higher education marketplace has become competitive, like never before. Every school, college, university, and coaching center tries its best to attract and retain their students every year. Thus, along with enterprise management systems, institutions are also using customer relationship management solutions designed for educational institutions.
If leveraged, the customer relationship management system can help institutions in developing personal and stronger relationships with students.
A Single Tool For Tracking Prospects On Varied Channels
Understanding the applicant is crucial for schools, colleges, and universities. Each applicant is a unique individual and may show a different behavior on social networking sites. Thanks to SCRM, the educational institute’s marketing, and admission reps can track the prospect’s behavior and fine-tune their strategy before approaching the applicants with admission offers.
Besides telephonic helpline, emails, and the website, students also use social networking sites for gathering information about schools, colleges, universities. Advanced CRM (SCRM) helps institutions in tracking leads and handling new admission inquiries from email, call center, as well as social media channels. The CRM allows a quick evaluation of every potential lead. Plus, the organization needs to allot lesser resources on marketing campaigns due to smart marketing using a single tool for various channels.
Besides targeting prospects, the right CRM solution can help in monitoring interactions about the college or university. Students’ councilors can track, analyze the same, and revert with answers to the issues highlighted therein.
CRM’s analytical capabilities can help in tracking, determining the progress as well as ROI for marketing initiatives.
Handling Inquiries From Pupils And Parents Through CRM
Institutions need to offer a high-quality service when it comes to students’ queries. A customer relationship system helps institutes in enhancing communication with their students and maintaining a record for every interaction for future reference. Teachers, professors can also store details about the concerns highlighted by pupils and parents during the counseling process. Management and faculty can refer to previous interactions with students and stakeholders to offer the best possible solutions.
This is the era of virtual assistant software that can handle basic queries with zero errors, 24*7. The consumer relationship software can be tuned to work with chatbots, email automation, and other AI, ML tools for answering fundamental questions with highly personalized replies.
Maintaining Relations With The Alumni Community
The alumni community can help schools, colleges, and universities in various ways. From fundraising, spreading the right word of mouth, to assisting new students in defining their career goals, alumni can contribute in many ways. A CRM with marketing automation feature helps the organization in creating a network and maintaining long-lasting relationships with the alumni community by sending timely alerts, greetings, as well as details about various events organized by the institution.
CRM Pounds A Crucial Role In Modern Students’ Lifecycle
CRM for educational institutes helps the organization in student life cycle management, right from reaching out to prospects, to completing their enrollment procedure. Monitoring students’ progress, handling their concerns via personalized communication channels and retaining them until their graduation also remains easy.
Handling Administrative Tasks
From monitoring finance, students’ admission, teachers’ recruitment, maintaining law and order as well as cleanliness, to ensuring adherence to state regulations, the management has a lot at stake. Educational institutions have multiple departments, and each of them has different administrative tasks to be performed. The administration needs to keep track of all the activities, besides helping all the stakeholders in making informed decisions.
CRM, combined with ERP solutions, can help the management in gathering information and managing various functions from a centralized location. Monitoring a specific department or class’s performance, accessing a student or faculty’s information for evaluation was never so easy. The data from the CRM can be access anytime from anywhere by individuals who have administrative clearance for the same.
The software can be program for generating course-related, fees-taxes-cess related, or students’ feedback related reports for complying with local or central government’s regulations.
The CRM saves a lot of time and resources as the need to create a physical document record is eliminated.
System Integration
System integration is no more costly exercise. The plug and play cloud-based modern CRMs have made the implementation procedure easy for universities. It is no more an uphill task as there is no need to install a large chunk of on-premises hardware. The customer relationship solution can also sync with the existing email server, institute’s website, apps, and existing ERP systems as well. The CRM can integrate, send, and receive data from other solutions. Firms that offer CRM development services can assist in system integration projects.
Modern CRMs Generating Performance Reports
The custom reporting features in modern CRMs make life easy for the institute’s administrators. The ability to extract knowledge from a vast database within seconds helps managers in tracking campus performance, lead source attribution, and even check admission assistants’ performance daily.
The higher management can also use the CRM to reach out to students and get their feedback on school administration, guest lecturers, and facilities provided within the premises. Feedback for teachers, professors working at various locations can be analyzed for rating and ranking purposes.
A centralized student information database in the form of CRM helps the management with details about student achievements. Highlighting the same on the institution’s websites, apps, and forum remains easy. It helps in attracting prospects as well as in motivating the existing students.
Why Opt For CRM When There’s ERP?
Enterprise Resource Planning software focuses on administrative tasks, while the Consumer Relations System helps in developing a bond with prospects, as well as students. It plays a crucial role in improving students’ retention percentage and ensuring perfect coordination between students, teachers, and higher management.
Every school, college, university, or coaching institute’s requirement can be different when it comes to CRM features. A reputed CRM development company can help in designing the best CRM with relevant characteristics for an educational institution.
If you are searching for a CRM software development company that offers custom software and apps for educational institutions, you should discuss your needs with Smart Sight Innovations.
