Today, each and every touchpoint and interactions you have with families add up while they’re weighing many school options.
In order to stand out from the competition, you want to get more face time with your prospects to nurture a meaningful relationship, but:

• You are understaffed!
• You don’t have enough resources to get in more face time.

Fortunately, there is a solution to easily manage all your admissions responsibilities with limited resources so that you can spend meaningful time in building human connection with your prospects.
A school CRM can enhance your ability to effectively manage every relationship you’re building with prospective families without sacrificing any of the face to face relationship-building required in admissions.

 

What Is A CRM And Why Do Schools Need It?

A CRM or Client Relationship Management is a customer-centric system that can help education professionals in:

• Nurturing relationships with prospective parents and enrollees
• Producing data-driven meaningful insights to illustrate progress towards goals, and
• Streamlining admissions and marketing initiatives to save time and effort.

It’s an undeniable fact that the education market is rapidly evolving at the speed of change. Unparalleled forces are exerting massive pressure on educational institutions, manifesting a wide range of threats including factors like

• Increased Competition
• Decreased Funding
• Higher Parent Expectations
• Smaller Applicant Pools Each Year

Empowering students and their parents by providing them with personalized solutions during every stage of the student lifecycle is the need of the hour and a “must have” capability, for any successful education institution in today’s demanding environment.
In order to survive this violent competition, providing a personalized and meaningful experience at every stage of the student lifecycle allows institutions to achieve their strategic goals in the areas of growth, intelligence, quality, and efficiency.

 

COVID-19 Pandemic And Its Impact On Schools:

With the current state of mayhem the world is in, COVID-19 is posing as a huge challenge for education systems including:

• The Need To Operate Remotely
• Accountability
• Employee Moral
• Declining Sales

How can schools keep their employees motivated and perform at the maximum efficiency without being physically present in the same office?
Using a CRM software for all your admission processes can serve as a holy grail and will have immense value in getting a clearer overview of all the vital communications between your admission teams and prospective families.

For those who are new to the concept of CRM, or just researching to explore their options and adopt a CRM platform for schools.

A CRM software for your admissions office can provide more opportunities to:

• Personalize touchpoints to nurture each prospect’s personalized needs and drive your inquiry to enrollment figures.
• Streamline the entire lifecycle from prospect to enrollment by personalizing at each step of the customer journey.
• Automate reminders across multiple channels to provide an easy-to-follow path during the application process.

 

How Can A CRM Help Schools Function Better?

No matter how you perceive the idea of a CRM, gaining insights on what exactly it can do to help your school can take some thorough research. A CRM software for a school can offers a wide range of applications to help you manage and interact with leads, with some additional benefits:

Managing Inquiries

• Lead Management
  Potentially, one of the most useful features of a CRM is the ability to create workflows or campaigns to devise your strategies to manage and nurture specific segments of your audience, right from the touchpoint of their initial inquiry to enrollment to your school.Additionally, CRM systems also have an in-built marketing automation functionality, which allows you to incorporate a variety of automated communication features in your campaigns to provide personalized communication to different segments of your audience.For instance, Automated email marketing campaigns are the most commonly used CRM feature for admission campaigns.
• Admission Process Automation
  With a school CRM, you can easily view your inquiry source and easily evaluate if your inquiries are coming through your school’s website, a social media ad, organic search results or any other channels that you use for marketing promotions.
• With This Data You Can
  • Fine tune your marketing efforts based on the most successful strategies.
  • Get a birds eye view on multiple channels and gain insights on which ones are working and the ones that aren’t serving your school’s growth.
  • Create a personalized communication plan for each segment.
  • Multiply your enrollment goals.
• Pursue Leads Based On Hotness Meter
  Leverage both a high level and more specific view of bottlenecks within each step of your customer journey. Prioritize conversations and record their aspirations and objections into your school CRM software directly.
• Deal Pipeline
  Setup touchpoints around each stage of the admission process. Track incomplete student applications to address their concerns and spearhead them to completion. Easily send online application deadline reminders, application status updates, and much more.
• Bulk Mail
  A CRM system for your school can easily analyze each candidate’s profile and suggest the best individualized communications based on their personal needs, enabling you to communicate smarter and with speed.
• Email Automation
  Send out tailored communication in your outreach with email automation. With a CRM, you can easily send across automated mailers to direct families to take actions including:
  • Application reminders
  • Information about upcoming events,
  • Financial aid and other information they are most interested in learning more about.
• Easy Integration
  CRM for schools can easily integrate across multiple channels like social media and admission forms on your website to capture leads from multiple platforms, but converges the data into one single platform.
• Admission Process Simplified
  A school CRM lets you seamlessly manage student admissions lifecycle from one single intuitive platform so that you can easily:
  • Reduce lengthy admission procedures and make the entire process effortless.
  • Handle and record academic documents with ease.
  • Perform other tasks that are required in completing the admission process.
  • Build long term relations with parents by scheduling interview appointments and send automated follow-ups for every inquiry with inbuilt email automation capabilities.
  • Record every interaction with the student and parents during the counseling process in real time and engage with them across all touchpoints in the student experience cycle.
  • Deliver state of the art user experience by establishing personalized communication channels that provide measurable results back to you so that you can make informed decisions each time, every time.
• Year Round Activities
  A CRM software equips your school with the right tools to manage personal connections and networks all year round. You can gain useful insights about your customers and maintain regular communication with the parent with Marketing Automation and build meaningful long-lasting relationships.
• Bulk Email For Finance Operations
  Every school needs an efficacious finance management tool to run their finance operations smoothly.
• A CRM Pprovides A School With The Capabilities To
  • To run finance operations smoothly.
  • Automating the fee payment process through the best school administration software to avoid discrepancies and human errors for hassle-free operation.

  Once a student gets enrolled, every school needs to go through the retention phase which revolves around monitoring student progress. With a CRM you can directly send emails to parents about the progress of their children.

• Easily Generate Real-Time Reports
  • To assess students, teachers, and the staff performance of your organization
  • Get actionable insights for seamless management of tasks and have a 360-degree view of your performance enquiry to enrollment.
  • Intuitively analyze the efficiency of various marketing channels and gain insights about what is working for you.

 

What’s The Best Strategy For Your School When It Comes To Choosing A CRM?

When it comes to a CRM solution, there aren’t any one-size-fits-all, and the features you should look for vary from industry to industry, organization to organization. For a school particularly you should conduct an analysis to determine if the following features map out the vision you have for running your school.

• User Friendly
  User-friendliness is the most basic requirement for organisations when deciding a CRM.Without usability, your school staff might find it complicated to use the tool and might end up struggling with day to day activities hence reducing productivity.Without a doubt “user-friendliness” can be subjective, and with circumstances and needs varying according to your needs. Identifying a system that is universally user-friendly is near-impossible, however CompanyHub is a lot more customizable than other CRMs and can be easily adapted to your needs with simple drag and drop.
• 360 Degree View Of Any Lead
  With a crm you can have a 360-degree customer view about their touchpoints, likes, pain points, and deliver a customized and frictionless experience.Lets take for instance that a customer has generated a support ticket, it would be helpful for your support teams to have ready access to the customer’s sales information, along with any of their past communications and ticket history. Even for closing an admission, you need academicss to the prospect’s information, all the options they’re evaluating, and any other interactions across all touch points.

Only when you provide a seamless customer experience, you are able to truly delight your customers and in order to do so it’s extremely important to find crucial information at all times. With CompanyHub, managing leads is as seamless as baking a cake.

• Easy Reminders
  Get reminders easily as texts and emails sent to the parents or one of your team members. With the capability of sending reminders parents will appreciate an added level of personal attention and thus improve your school’s customer experience.With CompanyHub’s CRM you don’t need to spend minutes creating followup tasks every time. Just set a date and it will show up in follow ups.
• Create Custom Fields
  A good CRM tool lets you track any information like geography, interests, size etc or associate different records using custom fields.

With CompanyHub you can track additional information in students’ profiles to identify students based on their interest and skills in academics, sports, music etc to better understand the students and nurture them accordingly.

• Custom Tables
  A good CRM tool should let you add custom tables and make it possible to bring complex data sets, unique business processes, and specialized industry practices together. With this feature you are able to embed tables with spreadsheet-like functionality, so you can track rich, specialized data.With CompanyHub you can track more than just contacts, admissions etc You can create your own custom field in a good old excel style look and feel with their own forms and data.
• Create Custom Filters
  CRM softwares should allow you to filter and search for your desired records from the master list of records, and display the Custom Filter search separately in the module.

CompanyHub creates easy filters to find specific records to assign to different sales reps and much more by allowing you to filter records in just 1 click, create new filters, change columns and set default filters.

• Inbuilt Invoice Generation
  What if you could seamlessly manage your invoicing each month and send professional invoices and automate payment reminders?With CompanyHub you can easily send out invoices to the parents each month or yearly.
• Reporting
  CompanyHub lets you create custom reports to track a child’s progress based on various factors like academics, fitness/sports, communication, etc. which can help to assure the parents your school is the right choice for their children and provide them with a great customer experience not only throughout each step of the admission process, but lets you provide state of the art experience throughout the customer lifecycle as well.
• Customer Support
  Despite all that has been said and done about how great a CRM is, you may face some obstacles. There is no rocket science with CompanyHub, but even when you feel the slightest problem, you know we are just a ping away.Just live chat, call, or mail us! 24*7, feel free to ask your questions, and perhaps, the best way to overcome problems is by trying it out yourself. Go ahead.

 

Here’s What We Feel

The possibilities of finding a CRM software for schools plenty. However, everything boils down to your requirements and how its features can cater to your needs. The wise decision to take while choosing a CRM software for your school would be to get a customizable CRM.

One major point to consider is that not all CRMs are meant for your school. Each school’s requirements differ from the other and you need to identify your requirements, goals and objectives first. Then it becomes easy for you to choose the best CRM solution that suits your school.

Try CompanyHub CRM For Schools, for free now!