CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications have always been used by Sales and Marketing departments of all industries. Step by step, the CRM strategies and philosophies logically spread over every type of industries or institutions.
For schools, students or their parents are the customers. Then it’s logical to care about these customers from the first contact (suspect), their interests (prospect), their admissions (client) up to their graduations, even up to the end of the graduated careers. The software industry, the initiated, loves to create acronyms understood only by them, like secret words. This CRM solution for Students is a SRM (Student Relationship Management). It can be either called a SLM (Student Life Management) or even a LMS (Learning Management System). For SEO reasons, we will keep using CRM in this post. 😊
In the hands of the School management team, this CRM is a crucial tool to help the organization truly serves its students in full capacity, get and share a 360° view on their personal and academic profiles. This tool is the nervous system and the memory of the school or university. It provides processes and analytical for all educational needs as some are listed below.
Maintaining relationship and Recruiting
After targeting the potential students, schools get the best students through qualification and a proper following up mechanism. Once students have shown interest in your school, you need to go out and build a connection with them. This will ensure that they feel free to ask for any help within the admission process and also find out any info about the institution and classes.
With the help of a CRM software you can prepare comprehensive lists of all applicants, the various stages they are in, and the probable help and motivation that needs to be provided to them. More particular information such as the current point of contact for a lead or the various conversations they have engaged in can also be portrayed in the software. Since all these processes will be automated with the help of CRM, the entire recruitment process will become much more effective and streamlined. Some schools spent more than 2 months with paper forms and manually re-keying thousands of students’ data, before using AtemisCloud Education solution. Now, it’s a matter of spreading out the digital forms to the students, aggregating and validating all admissions in few minutes.
Credits: Microsoft / Hololens
Data and reports
Running an educational institution means handling a huge pile of internal data. From attendance, academic records, recruitment stages, to all the various other student centric program an institution organizes develops data on all the students. This data is highly important as it is the source of all analysis, dashboard and KPI. This data allows to gauge and improve the actual quality of the institution.
A CRM software uses its dashboard to provide easy access to all data and enables the creation of drill down analytical reports. These charts provide the users with acute information regarding the status of the institute on various axis, aggregate external data such competitive analysis and allows accurate business decision. “Information at the source of action” is the slogan of AtemisCloud since 1998. This helps the management make accurate and informed decisions regarding the improvements of their institution. The Artificial Intelligence features allow the collection of additional data, the understanding of the correlation between the subjects, the teachers and the scores, the detection of anomalies in the students scores and segments students by groups depending on their scores, essays and personal interests.
Better quality data – Better Management
With efficient data sources, analytical decision can be accurate. This is what most institutional managements should improve. The fact that they are being provided with sub-par data makes their decisions gullible to error. And when this happens in a bigger scale it can lead to loss of resources, effort, and reputation.
The best way to ensure proper source attribution is through the right use of a CRM software. When you place all your current data into the CRM software it will automatically show you the gaps within it. In the IT industry, professionals use the words: “Trash in, Trash out”. Having clean and complete data helps track down the points where source attribution is necessary, and the further collection of data can be integrated within the software itself. Once all the data banks have been ensured of their quality, it will automatically reflect in the managerial decisions an institution takes. Moreover, when several schools and universities have deployed CRM solutions, they can share students data between themselves with the agreements of the students. This students' big data allows everyone to spare time, money, get consolidated data improving confidence and quality.
Processes Management
When you completely delve into a CRM system, all your immediate and future goals become clearer. And all the changes that are made henceforth are keeping in mind the final goal that is to be reached. Student recruitment campaigns, teacher selection procedures, or just general administrative policies of the institution, all of them can benefit from the use of a CRM software. The total quality of the organization improves and facilitates the collection of international certifications and awards.
Institutions that currently use CRM as part of their management come up with some of the best recruitment campaigns keeping in mind social variables such as ethnicity, gender ratio, etc. The ability to judge in real time how a certain campaign is performing allows for making quick and necessary changes to it. Additionally, any problem that may arise in the future can be addressed much before using a CRM software.
Share and ensure student participation
Students needs to be taken care of in every way possible by their institutions. In order to do this the management needs to know every student and this is possible through the information systems only. What a CRM software can do is provide you with the necessary details about any student at a moment’s notice and thereby ensure that you got all information.
This also provides the student with a sense that their interests are being looked after by the institution. As a result, the student performs better and is more active towards the entire academic environment. So, with the help of a CRM software including students’ and parents’ extranet the individual capabilities of students can be explored, and all their problems can be addressed at the right time.
It should be clear by now how important a role CRM plays in the educational sector. The reason behind this is that although we look at education with a different eye than other industries, data still remains data. Nowadays we manage any company or institution through data. It has been proven time and again any process is improved with the help of the data management and intelligence.
To add more Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence features can improve the content, the classes, the students and the school management.
So, if you are part of a school's or university's management, you need to shift your management team to a CRM centric organization today! Enjoy the benefits of a cloud CRM for Education and ensure full satisfaction from your staff, your students and their parents.
Get your own.