Case Studies

Helping a higher education organization improve its CRM system

Our client is a large publicly held, international, higher education organization in North America, serving more than 99,000 students annually from colleges and universities in more than 84 locations in the United States and Canada, as well as via online education.

Sales had increased 40 percent over a five-year time period for this organization - tremendous growth that strained its systems and processes. The organization was using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that was implemented as part of a larger Student Information System (SIS) implementation. This application was not providing adequate functionality to support the growing student lead volumes, or the breadth and depth of processes for marketing to prospective, new and returning students.

To augment the core CRM system in the short term, the organization developed a series of custom interfaces and implemented a variety of third party CRM and Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools, resulting in a number of disparate systems requiring support and maintenance.

In addition, the organization's processes were overwhelmingly manual and inefficient - approximately 9,100 annual work hours were spent to produce just one report each week.

The legacy add-on approach created as an interim solution would not support the organization's rapid business growth. The organization's future technology vision focused on a more efficient technology foundation with fewer software products, improved user interfaces, and better integration between the core SIS and any separate CRM and/or SFA solution. Moreover, the solution had to support a rapidly growing number of users.

Impart Solutions was hired to manage a CRM system selection project and conduct a high-level business process assessment to identify the appropriate software to meet the business and technology needs, and recommend improvements to the existing processes.

This included the following tasks:

• Gathering functional and technical requirements
• Creating a request for proposal
• Developing a vendor short list
• Creating a business case justification
• Identifying short and long-term process improvements

Impart interviewed more than 60 employees and provided the organization with a list of actions to be completed in the short- and long-term. Additionally, Impart provided detailed options for achieving quantifiable results.

As a result of Impart's strategic solutions, the organization achieved the following benefits:

• Solid process assessment with actionable recommendations for quick wins and long-term process improvements
• Recommendations to improve efficiency of legacy systems by expanding the use of existing software
• Recommendations to improve reporting and training initiatives using the current system
• A comprehensive evaluation of functional and technical requirements for a new CRM system
• Improved integration among the existing systems
• Reduced manual processes and the elimination of inefficient workaround processes