Building long-term relationships with students
As mentioned above, competition in the higher education sector had become increasingly fierce. Gathering information about students had become critical and could impact significant decisions. Getting to know candidates before the school even accepted them could help it “lock in” students before they were snatched up by competitors. Likewise, information collected from students taking online courses with EDUlib could help the school promote targeted programs more likely to lead to applications to HEC Montréal.
Although HEC Montréal was able to manage student records through its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, operations related to the ability to build and maintain strong relationships with prospective, current, and graduate students proved challenging. The school could not paint a comprehensive picture of students from the moment they showed interest in HEC Montréal to the moment they graduated. The data required to build this picture was either missing or scattered across the school’s various services based on their interactions with students. Preliminary inquiries to department heads by prospective graduate students were typically made via email. While a convenient form of communication, this made it difficult to evaluate the total number of candidates who had shown interest in studying at HEC Montréal compared to the number who actually ended up applying for graduate programs.
As information was deemed to be the key to addressing the challenges faced by HEC Montréal, a task force was struck in 2009 to evaluate the feasibility and potential benefits of acquiring a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Once fully implemented, this system would consolidate data about prospective, current, and past students, enabling services to gain a comprehensive understanding of students and provide what is known as a “360-degree customer view.” For HEC Montréal, this would mean getting a clearer picture of who applied to the school’s various
For the exclusive use of m. yildiz, 2022.
This document is authorized for use only by mesut yildiz in APM Fall 2022 taught by SUSAN STEVENS, Endicott College from Sep 2022 to Dec 2022.
From Students to Alumni: Implementing CRM to Build Lifelong Relationships at HEC Montréal – Part A
© HEC Montréal 9
programs, their needs, and who was interested in applying but eventually went elsewhere. Gathering this data would also help the school to improve its website by including information that prospective students are unable to find there, forcing them to call the school – especially Recruiting services and the Office of the Registrar. From an operational standpoint, this would mean optimizing processes and reducing the need for staff to answer common questions from prospective students. A comprehensive Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) could be added to the website.
Although the CRM project was seen as important by the school, it was not approved until 2013. Before then, the school’s IT Governance committee, which met every trimester to decide which IT projects to greenlight, could not commit to such a major project impacting key student-facing services. Budgetary cuts by the provincial government had forced the school’s IT department to re- prioritize its projects and limited it to three per year. With its ambitious goal of consolidating data across services, the CRM project was initially perceived as too risky since its anticipated benefits were difficult to quantify. As a result, the project was constantly postponed in favour of smaller projects aiming to optimize business processes.
In 2012, Lemay, who had been a regular user of CRM in his previous job outside the higher education sector, began looking into acquiring a CRM system for Recruiting services.
PeopleSoft is a good records system. But what I need, for the student recruitment process, is a system of engagement. We need to be able to gather and analyze information so that our recruiting tactics can be targeted for optimal effectiveness. For example, I cannot send my staff to all the education fairs across the world to recruit prospective MBAs. How do I know which fairs are more lucrative in terms of actual applications, rather than those where we see some interest but which translate into few applications at HEC Montréal? (Michel Lemay, head of Recruiting services)
For Lemay, the key to ensuring that HEC Montréal remained a top business school was to build and maintain long-term relationships with prospective and current students. If successful, this could lead to their choosing HEC Montréal for their ongoing educational needs, either at the school or via EDUlib. It would also facilitate the work of Alumni services and the Foundation when they periodically canvassed alumni for donations. Observing that the project had been stalled for years and that some services were starting to grow impatient to the point of thinking about launching the project on their own, the IT department took advantage of a reprieve in budgetary cuts to commit to the implementation of a CRM system at HEC Montréal. Richard Lacombe, the school’s director of information technologies, asked his staff to meet with representatives from the school’s services to do a preliminary assessment of their business processes and CRM needs. This initial step aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the scope of the student lifecycle at HEC Montréal so the project could begin on a firm foundation. Pierre-Yves Tremblay, a business process analyst, and An-Phong Do, an IT project manager, were put in charge of this preliminary assessment.
Onward and upward
For Michel Lemay, Richard Lacombe, Pierre-Yves Tremblay, An-Phong Do, and several other HEC Montréal employees, the official approval of the CRM project was an important milestone. Although it marked the beginning of what promised to be a lengthy initiative that would occupy a significant portion of their time, all were convinced that CRM was key to creating and maintaining personal, long-term relationships with students. 2019-12-06
For the exclusive use of m. yildiz, 2022.
This document is authorized for use only by mesut yildiz in APM Fall 2022 taught by SUSAN STEVENS, Endicott College from Sep 2022 to Dec 2022.