Technology evolution has influenced all the industries. Amongst them, the education industry is going through vital changes at every point. Evolution of the internet, electronic devices, and mobile phones have accelerated this growth.
Mobility Solutions in Higher Education
The Higher Education(HE) institutions are undergoing massive changes in operations and communication with students, teachers, parents, alumnus, staffs and prospects. Because students demand more tailored learning journey, individualised attention, and services. To serve these demands, institutions must become more efficient and start to implement technological tools which shall make things easier, manageable, and support in decision-making with the help of data and analytics.
In today’s education ecosystem, students are energetic, mobile, and tech-savvy. They are always connected to the internet. Mobility solutions such as CRM, mobile applications, and cloud solutions, etc., helps to automate and manage communications with prospects, customers, staffs and teachers “on the go”. These systems must be implemented to meet the needs of the new generation in an efficient way while cost-effectively addressing the requirements of the college and everyone in their community.
With the help of mobility software’s, institutions can bring together data elements from various sources to create a 360° view of each student and prospects. It activates information access smoother, delivers a personalised experience, creates targeted campaigns and sends messages in a timely manner. Moreover, student management solutions can be used to predict student’s success rate by tracking their activity and performance.
Needs and Benefits
Mobility solutions in HE assist colleges/institutions to manage their students, staffs, teachers and prospects on a single platform efficiently. The various needs and benefits are -
1. Student Life Cycle Management (Contact Management)
At present, students are neither connected nor engaged through any of the channels or touch points as part of their study life. This infers that there is no particular method to communicate and serve the students based on their progress in the course.
Mobility solutions are designed to impact on every connection in the student life cycle and flawlessly integrate with institution resources and systems. Also, it helps to track every aspect of an individual student life cycle. With the help of data and analytics, institutions can now predict the student’s failure or success rates.
2. Service and Communication
Faculties and students are exploring the applicability of mobility services that can enhance the learning experience and assistance with research.
Software tools provide faster communications like online resources access, streaming administrative tasks, notify students about class cancellations, grade allocation and etc.
3. Automation
Emails, social media messages, student alerts and any other type of communications can now be automated in order to speed up the response time. Mobility solutions shall provide workflow automation that takes care of all the follow-up processes.
4. Recruitment, Marketing and Operations
Recruitments and marketing features help institutions to create targeted recruitment campaigns and help in lead management. Email marketing tools and templates further optimise the student recruitment process. This allows for smarter marketing, forecasting and budget planning, by maximising the ROI of the marketing process.
5. Help and Support
Any profile or student that is connected to the system can get a help at any time or even contact respective departments, whether it is related to online tutorials/training, email, live chat, fee and exam management, etc.
HE Mobility Solutions
The competition has gone up in the higher education market as the students started to demand more personalised and faster experiences. There are industry-specific and generic mobility solution providers compete in this segment. They are –
The system is an open source solution which was built on salesforce platform and It helps to manage the complete student lifecycle from inquiry to alumnus.
Student CRM is a student recruitment tool that specifically built for the UK HE market. The solution allows institutions to purchase necessary modules based on the needs as part of pricing strategy.
Ascend is made for the recruitment part of the SLC with multi-language capability. Pricing is based on the number of applications registered.
Admittor is a simple system that offers white labelling option, high-level customization and a tagging system. It activates users to better manage and search the applicant pool with advanced execution options.
Jenzaber is a cloud-based CRM system that has integrated with IBM “Cognos” software which helps from reporting to analysis and metrics. “Dotmailer” integration brings email marketing optimization.
Full Fabric is popular with its appealing and easy to navigate design. The key features are real-time reporting and google maps integration with a great focus on prospect students.
Azorus focuses on recruitment and retains “more of the right students”. The platform has the ability to engage students at all the touch points with the institution, and also have the options to manage lead generation and event creation.
Campus Management is a complete student lifecycle CRM comes with both on-premises and cloud based solutions for the maximum functionality.
Mira Network is a multi-lingual mobility solution market leader in the Nordic Countries that comes with an Office 365 and LinkedIn integrations.
This solution is specifically designed to manage student admissions with a set of features, such as reporting, student exchange, and agent management.
The system comes with a lot of functional features such as staff performance tracker along with workflow automation, in-depth real-time reporting, Microsoft tools integrations, and online behavioural tracking.
Radius is an admission and enrollment CRM that helps to manage processes from enquiry to application and enrollment by tracking all student connections. This system allows identification of at-risk students, student outcomes, academic advising and online payments.
Proretention is a complete student relationship management solution that comes with various features such as multi-channel communication modes, vendor management, dialer integration and with inbuilt dashboards and reports.
The system is built for the Nordic education market. It offers offline access that allows offline data collection and automatic data synchronisation along with ROI insights from each marketing channel.
Future Trends
The importance of mobility solutions for the higher education industry is under continuous development to make learning more real-world & student oriented. The opportunities are higher in this market segment because of more enhanced demands and the popularity of “on the go” services. The Internet and digital transformation are the major causes of growth in the education industry and it is on the rise.
Research and surveys reveal that 59% of Institutions do not use any CRM because of the lack of knowledge on Mobility Solutions along with budget limitations. Surveys indicate that most of the colleges are considering to implement mobility solutions in the near future that opens up a whole lot of new opportunities.
