In today’s competitive education sector, higher education institutions are looking to improve their student retention rates and enhance the entire student lifecycle. This is where a crucial piece of technology–Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions come into play for managing student data and optimizing recruitment and admissions processes.
Higher Education CRM systems streamline the admissions process while improving team productivity, optimizing software budgets, and providing valuable data insights for management to take faster actions. From supporting prospective and current students to enhancing student success, CRM platforms have become essential for educational institutions.
In this article, we highlight how a Higher Education CRM aids not only processes but entire teams involved in those processes across multiple departments.
Let’s look at how a CRM aids processes at higher education institutes.
Effective CRM for Higher Ed Student Journey
Here’s how a CRM can help your institution improve admission-related processes across teams, including sales and marketing processes.
| Process | Admissions | Marketing | Reporting and Analytics |
| Student Onboarding | Capture student interests | Multi-channel communication | Measure quality of incoming student inquiries |
| Student Engagement | Record historical data of conversations | Track real-time interactions | Measure marketing campaign performance |
| Student Information | End-to-end repository of student data captured from the education portal. | Targeted communication based on student preferences. | Track student journey and movement of inquiries |
| Student Conversations | One platform to store notes, call recordings, requirements, and more. | Improved messaging | Qualitative insights and process improvements |
| Student Experience | Audience segmentation | Targeted outreach | Measure NPS scores and education KPIs |
Whether it is improving student enrollment or how students interact with the institute and the team–CRM systems help universities identify gaps in their student lifecycle management, take corrective action, and measure impact seamlessly.
If you don’t have an Education CRM, then maintaining hundreds of records on paper or excel proves to be tedious for your enrollment professionals. It also hampers the visibility of how prospective students progress down your admissions funnel.
Here’s an example: a student has filled a form on your website and showed interest in the bachelor’s program. Now, your data entry resource will have to pull out the student data, assign it to a counsellor (who may or may not know their course of interest) and then set up the first interaction.
With a Higher Education CRM in place you get:
Seamless Data Integration and Access
With a Higher Education CRM in place, there’s no need to manually pull data from the backend. The system automatically captures and organizes all student data, integrating with website forms and digital touchpoints. This provides real-time data access, reduces data silos, and optimizes software budgets for higher education institutions.
Automated Counselor Assignment for Improved Engagement
The CRM can auto-assign counselors based on students’ course interests through intelligent routing rules. This ensures student inquiries are matched with knowledgeable enrollment professionals, enhancing engagement and streamlining the admissions process. The automated assignment also supports workload balance across departments and ensures prospective students are promptly attended to.
Immediate Multichannel Campaign Activation
Higher education CRMs enable universities to activate multichannel campaigns, leveraging social media and automation tools to meet student expectations. Personalized campaigns share targeted information about campus life, services, and support based on student preferences. This tracking throughout the student engagement cycle supports coordinated marketing and insights throughout the student lifecycle.
You have not only saved the cost of a resource but also sped up the time of reaching out to the student.
These are the kind of process changes that will affect your conversion rates as well as improve counsellor conversations.
Now that we know what impact a CRM for higher education institutes creates for your processes, let’s see how it benefits your team.
Benefits of a Higher Ed CRM for Admissions Teams
The student’s journey from discovery to alumni and post that, they interact with multiple people from the institution, covering the entire student lifecycle. How can an Education CRM benefit these people and the students who take this journey with them?
We’ll discover how it benefits –
- Nelly–our student counsellor
- Caleb–our prospective student
- Nate–our finance guy
- Mr. Brown–our admissions head
- Ms. Cho–our marketing manager
- Mr. Singh–from the administration team
The process
When a prospective student like Caleb fills out an inquiry form, our higher education CRM instantly captures the student data and notifies the admissions team. The CRM automatically route this information through our education data architecture, ensuring no student inquiries slip through the cracks.
Nelly, one of our experienced enrollment professionals, is automatically assigned through the CRM platform based on her expertise with Caleb’s program of interest. This smart assignment ensures optimal student engagement from the first interaction, following our established recruitment and admissions processes.
Within minutes, Nelly connects with Caleb using our integrated CRM platform’s multichannel communication tools. She introduces herself as his dedicated counselor, quickly understands his student expectations, and extends an invitation for a virtual campus tour. This seamless process demonstrates how our CRM solutions help transform prospective students’ first interactions into engaging, personalized experiences while maintaining efficient student lifecycle management.
Benefit #1 – Drive personalized conversations
Nelly, the counsellor, is able to identify the exact requirements Caleb has and drive personalized student engagement, connecting with both prospective and current students effectively through the CRM platform.
Benefit #2 – Reach out to a wider geography
A higher education CRM enables institutions to reach out to a wider geography, connecting with prospective students from all over the world. Through learning management systems integration, institutions can manage relationships with student populations across different time zones, cultures, and languages.
As a prospective student, Caleb has more clarity on the course he has selected and is looking forward to experiencing campus life from the comfort of his home.
Post our virtual tour, Caleb is happy with the facilities and would like to take his application ahead. Nelly then shares personalized credentials for Caleb to apply for his course. Caleb’s status automatically updates to “In Progress” from interested.
Benefit #3 – Complete visibility for the applicant
Digitized application process means less hassle for Caleb while sending his course applications. Thanks to advanced document management features, he can easily manage and submit all necessary documents. He doesn’t have to fill in multiple paper forms or update PDFs and he has visibility on the upcoming actions he has to take to complete his enrollment process.
Benefit #4 – Time saving
As an admission counsellor, Nelly caters to many prospective students but doesn’t have to rely on manual communication to update the actions that each student has completed. Instead, she has time to set another campus tour and focus on meaningful student interactions.
It’s almost the end of the day, and Mr. Brown, the admissions head and Nelly’s manager, is interested in seeing how his teams and student inquiries have progressed through the day. On his dashboard within the CRM system, he can see how Nelly has moved 5 more students to the application stage, and how many inquiries have reached the personal interview stage.
Benefit #5 – End-to-end visibility on admissions
Mr. Brown has clarity on how his admissions team is performing through the higher education CRM, how many more inquiries need to convert for the course to fulfill the number of seats, and at what stage maximum number of those are falling through.
Since Mr. Brown knows where his inquiries are falling through, he reaches out to Ms. Cho to run remarketing campaigns to get them back into the pool.
Ms. Cho, and her marketing team, have valuable insights on the stage at which the student fell through, the course that has the maximum drop-offs, and that some students haven’t made their choice yet. She buckets all these into various lists and adds them to a sequence of emails, texts, and WhatsApp messages regarding the pre-requisites of courses, opportunities the institute can offer, financial aid programs, and more.
Benefit #6 – Targeted segmentation and messaging
Since Ms. Cho only has to input certain marketing activities and add those to a particular bucket in the CRM platform, she will be able to see higher engagement rates for her university campaigns as they are highly targeted and personalised.
Benefit #7 – Lower acquisition costs
Because Ms. Cho can get a good size of the dropped off students back into the inquiry stage, her acquisition cost with each performing marketing campaign will keep dropping.
Thanks to Nelly’s counselling and Caleb’s prompt actions to complete the application form, he has been able to clear the interview stage and is sent an offer letter. Nelly sees that Caleb has opened the offer letter but hasn’t signed it yet. The offer is about to expire as Caleb hasn’t paid the course fees yet.
Nate from the finance department, sees this and notifies the counsellor that the student might lose out on his admission. Once the counsellor is notified, the student gets a quick walkthrough of the online payment process. And Nate sees that the student has completed the payment.
Benefit #8 – Integrated systems
Whether it is having telephony integration or multiple payment options, an effective Higher Education CRM helps colleges capture information across multiple platforms and eliminate data silos for all teams to have clarity on the progress of a student.
Caleb is excited to start his college life in the fall. Mr. Singh, from the administration team, is satisfied with his team’s performance as he can see the enrollment numbers go up, how many students have been offered a seat, and how far they are from fulfilling their quota for the year. He is more than happy to see how all accepted students’ information is already sitting in their student information systems. The right CRM solutions will give you the ability to integrate with your education data architecture and multiple other products, to migrate the information in a secure manner.
Benefit #9 – Passing information from one platform to another
Since the integrated CRM platform is able to connect with the education institute’s learning management systems, every student data point is securely passed and mapped to the course and year they are progressing in. This connection also empowers an institute to harness and manage alumni relationships while supporting current students.
Benefit #10 – Advanced reporting and analytics
Because the Higher Education CRM captures information at multiple stages, it is easy for all teams to analyze data and collate their numbers.
It is easy for Ms. Cho to see her email or text campaign open rates. Mr. Brown can see how many student inquiries his admissions team has contacted. Nate in Finance can look at the payment failures/expiration. Mr. Singh and his administrative tasks team can evaluate how many more inquiries needed to meet the yearly admission quota.
Benefit #11 – Take corrective actions
A CRM system enables institutions to take data-driven actions by empowering teams to re-visit their actions and understand what went wrong, enhancing student lifecycle management. It helps them identify the things that worked and the ones that didn’t. You can change processes, introduce new support services, or eliminate redundancies.
Benefit #12 – Improved team efficiency
Right from sending out automated responses through social media channels, sharing reminders for the student counsellors, and reminding the students to complete the payment, a College CRM improves team efficiency in terms of student outreach, calls connected, zero missed follow-ups, identifying new opportunities, and much more.
Additional Benefits
Unified view of constituent information
A CRM for higher education provides a unified view of constituent information, allowing institutions to manage relationships with prospective and current students, alumni, faculty, staff, and corporate partners in a single platform. This unified view enables institutions to track student interactions, communications, and engagement across multiple departments, providing a 360-degree view of each constituent.
Effective recruitment strategies
CRM solutions enable educational institutions to develop data-driven recruitment and admissions processes, leveraging valuable data insights and marketing campaigns. By using CRM technology, institutions can build targeted recruitment efforts, personalize communications, and deliver a more effective enrollment process.
Empowering student success
Through advanced document management features and learning management systems integration, CRM platforms support remote learning and enhance the student engagement cycle. With a CRM, institutions can track student progress, identify areas of need, and deliver targeted support services to improve student outcomes.
Building strong relationships
The right CRM system helps many higher education institutions foster connections through social media channels and live chat tools, creating a vibrant campus life experience that extends beyond the academic journey.
Conclusion
It’s clear that whether it’s Caleb or Nelly or Mr. Singh – they’ve all benefited from using a higher education CRM system for streamlined student lifecycle management and engagement.
From optimizing recruitment and admissions processes to enhancing student success, integrated CRM platforms have transformed how educational institutions manage prospective and current students through their academic journey.
Ready to revolutionize your enrollment management and student engagement? Book a Demo with LeadSquared today and join the growing community of educational institutions that are eliminating data silos, automating administrative tasks, and creating exceptional student experiences through our comprehensive CRM solutions.
