The higher education sector has become ultra-competitive today. The arrival of new international players and new training models has led schools to strengthen their marketing and business practices to continue attracting new students. The use of the free crm tools comes perfect.
The Right Choices
In this context, School Communication and Admissions services are gradually turning into real commercial services and it was only natural that they start to install CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software (CRM) to help them convince as many students as possible to join the school.
But developing a school is not just about recruiting students, and there are many other people involved who deserve as much attention in monitoring their relationship.
Schools at the heart of an ever larger ecosystem
To resist this intensification of competition, schools and universities have naturally innovated in their educational programs. They have initiated partnerships with other complementary schools and some companies, thus bringing collaborators from different structures to work together more frequently. The use for the best crm software comes useful now.
In this increasingly interactive and collaborative environment, the monitoring of relationships between all Stakeholders has become an “economic intelligence” issue for schools:
Internally: students, their parents for minors, educational and administrative teams.
As externally: candidates, partner schools and their collaborators, companies, tutors of internships, contractors, alumni, institutional, potential stakeholders, etc.
In concrete terms, this increasingly large ecosystem means that a person can receive information from the school several times via different communication channels; and some school staff are not always aware of what has been said by another.
In these conditions, use a CRM software for benefit from a 360 ° view of all these interactions is now essential. It allows the school’s staff to know at all times the state of relations with all contacts and communicate with them in a homogeneous way. By having the right information at the right time, they can personalize the exchange with their interlocutor and give an impression of individualized service quality.
What are the advantages of using a CRM in a school?
CRM software brings 3 quick benefits:
- Structured management of contacts, both natural and legal persons; the data is then more easily exploited by the Marketing for targeted campaigns.
- Greater speed to access information, employees are more responsive to meeting demands and this brings productivity gains.
- A simplification of the collaboration between the various services of the school since they share in the same place the information related to all the candidates, students, teachers and partners of the school.
But this last advantage may not be obtained when institutions deploy several different CRM software options. Indeed, some schools have begun to manage the recruitment of candidates in a dedicated CRM while keeping the student follow-up in their ERP or SIS (Student Information System), that of the learners in Continuing Education in another software package, their breeding ground. Speakers in a separate file, companies for the learning tax in another tool and finally the former students in separate last software. You need to know how to choose a crm also.
The implementation of several different tools makes us lose sight of the essential: the human. Today’s apprenticeship student may be a graduate manager, where he may be interested in taking internships and paying the apprenticeship tax. By developing his skills as his experience develops, he can become a potential speaker for the school or a prospect for a new continuing education program.
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