Higher EdInsight

As I said in my last Blog, the notion of decid­ing what CRM is or what CRM can do… is not easy espe­cially in the con­text of higher edu­ca­tion. Consider that when you Google “What is CRM?” about 21,000,000 results are returned. Yes CRM has been around for years in the com­mer­cial sec­tor and has been crit­i­cized for over promis­ing and under deliv­er­ing… and for being over hyped and over priced. And no doubt much of that crit­i­cism is jus­ti­fied. And for higher edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions… this is actu­ally very good news indeed. Because HEI’s have gen­er­ally been fol­low­ers on ini­tia­tives like CRM, the mis­takes of the past in the com­mer­cial mar­ket can be avoided (hope­fully). A fun­da­men­tal start­ing point then is defin­ing what you want CRM to accom­plish… both now and in the future. And it’s crit­i­cal to rec­og­nize that CRM is a jour­ney and not a des­ti­na­tion. Consider a Harvard Business Review arti­cle; CRM Done Right. “A wide range of com­pa­nies are suc­cess­fully tak­ing a prag­matic, dis­ci­plined approach to CRM. Rather than use it to trans­form entire busi­nesses, they’ve directed their invest­ments toward solv­ing clearly defined prob­lems within their cus­tomer rela­tion­ship cycle.”

So what “rela­tion­ship cycles” in the con­text of higher edu­ca­tion could ben­e­fit from CRM? Let’s start with enroll­ment issues where uni­ver­si­ties and col­leges need to find more stu­dents, or bet­ter stu­dents, or the right stu­dents or any com­bi­na­tion thereof. And what about reten­tion? Attracting and keep­ing stu­dents has never been more impor­tant in this hyper com­pet­i­tive global edu­ca­tion mar­ket­place. Over the com­ing weeks let’s con­sider the fol­low­ing two ques­tions from the HBR arti­cle to help start the CRM con­ver­sa­tion: Is the prob­lem strate­gic? Is the sys­tem focused on the pain point?