Schools Need to Rethink Their CRM Approaches

Encouraging Expansion

While Copeland and others see the growing use of technologies like live chat and Web self-service as encouraging, they contend that colleges and universities still have a long way to go. "Are schools buying CRM? Yes. Are they federating all of their interactions with students to understand the full student life cycle? No," Copeland says. "They are starting to apply technology to a problem, but are they getting at the heart of their individual relationships and streamlining or improving their overall relationships with each student? No."

While chat and Web self-service are helping address student concerns in the short term, these interactions are not being tracked or logged into a central system that covers the entire campus, Copeland laments. "It is unlikely that the interaction [a student] had with the financial aid office is accessible to someone in the registrar's office," he says. "I haven't seen a school where they are federating all of their student interactions into one system. All that data resides in one local office, and it's not pulled into a central system that hits all the touch points."

In fact, in a study of 119 schools conducted recently, Copeland's company found that 21 percent had deployed CRM software in just one department.

A notable exception is DePaul University in Chicago. DePaul deployed CallCopy's cc:Discover call center suite roughly three years ago when it set out to establish a centralized, one-stop contact center for answering phone inquiries from its more than 25,000 students on three campuses. CallCopy's call recording, quality assurance, and speech analytics serve as the backbone for DePaul Contact Central, a single source for information from financial aid, student records, student accounts, and other departments. With cc:Discover, DePaul was able to consolidate eight inquiry lines into one.

As a result, DePaul's Contact Central has nearly tripled the number of calls it is able to answer. In the first year alone, the school was able to improve first call resolution from 79 percent to 92 percent, reduce call handling time by 30 to 40 seconds, and increase customer satisfaction from 77 percent to 93 percent, according to Susan Leigh, associate vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul. A big contributor to that is the speech analytics, which helps determine why the student is calling and routes the call to the appropriate department if a live agent conversation is required.

Another exception is DeVry University. The school, which operates 96 campuses throughout the United States and Canada, is using Oracle's RightNow cloud solutions to provide current and prospective students with fast, accurate answers to their questions, regardless of how they choose to contact the school, whether via phone, email, or the Web, or the nature of the question. The school claims that 98 percent of student issues are resolved within 24 hours.

Dave Trafton, DeVry's online student services manager, says Oracle RightNow has helped the school become much more responsive to student needs. Moving forward, he expects DeVry to expand its student interaction options by leveraging additional channels, including online chat, Web self-service, and mobile.

On a Short List

Admittedly, not many schools are that advanced. Burkhart says of the nearly 5,000 colleges, universities, and trade schools in the United States, only about 40 or 50 could be considered CRM thought leaders. "The rest are still trying to wrap their hands around [CRM]," he says.

What's more, only a handful of schools currently marry student data with their CRM systems, adds Dave Richter, U.S. sales director for higher education service automation at Oracle.

"We're still in the early stages in higher education in figuring out what CRM means and what it can be," Copeland maintains.

CRM took years to catch on in the business world, and universities are definitely behind the curve, Copeland maintains. "CRM has been a difficult beast for corporations to master," he says. "In higher education, there will be more investments in it, but I do not get the sense that there will be a massive shift any time soon."

But, then again, that just might be for the best right now. "If you do not have a clear focus first, CRM will flounder," Copeland states emphatically.

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News Editor Leonard Klie can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.

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