Enrollment services departments have a lot of information to keep track of on a daily basis. In the process of building personal connections with prospective students and guiding them toward enrolling at an institution, they’re often bogged down by the minutiae of tracking, recording, and analyzing these interactions. 

But what if your team no longer had to concern itself with that minutiae? What if you could trade in your department’s color-coded spreadsheets for a proactive tool that makes everyone’s life easier and gives back valuable time and resources? 

A proactive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can automate the entire enrollment services process. You may have been led to believe that a CRM is simply a tool for entering and collecting data. But the right CRM system can transform your entire department by improving efficiency and productivity—and by fostering the deeper communication that helps prospects become newly enrolled students. 

Beyond Data Collection: How Proactive CRM Transforms Enrollment Services for Colleges

CRM reduces tedious administrative tasks and makes it much easier to gain insight into a prospective student’s journey. Here’s a look at what a proactive CRM tool can do: 

Automate sequences of tasks. 

When we set up a CRM for MindMax clients, we start by entering pre-established sequences of tasks into the system. When Task 1 is complete, it kicks off Task 2. When Task 2 is complete, it kicks off Task 3.—and so on and so forth until the end of the enrollment cycle. The task assignments may involve both members of our team and our client’s team. 

The automated system is reliable enough to “set it and forget it,” but agile enough to easily adjust and optimize sequences as needed. 

For some of our clients, a sequence looks something like this: 

1. The client makes the first outreach to a prospective student and then marks the task complete. If they don’t successfully reach that person, the next task transfers over to us.
2. We make another attempt to reach the prospective student and then mark the task complete. 
3. If we don’t reach the prospective student, we move them to a long-term drip campaign, where they continue receiving strategic communication from us outside the enrollment cycle. 
4. If the prospective student begins interacting with us, we enter them back into the enrollment cycle so our client has another opportunity to connect with them. 

The automated process makes it so much easier to keep track of prospective students along their journey so they won’t fall off the radar. 

Take action and record information.

Whether you need to make a phone call, send an email or text message, or set up registration for an event, you can take all these actions right inside the CRM tool. No outside tools or systems necessary!

When you’re ready to make a phone call, for example, you can simply click on a prospective student’s phone number to be connected to them. The phone system integrates back into the CRM and records important data, such as:

• The length of the call
• The date of the call 
• A hyperlink to the call recording
• Whether you spoke directly to the prospective student or left a voicemail 

By eliminating the need to record all of this data manually, the enrollment services team can focus on inputting any personalized notes and observations that would help deepen a prospective student’s profile. 

Generate reports. 

A proactive CRM system provides visibility into simple data, like the number of calls made on a daily basis, and complex data, like the percentage of prospective students who are interested in a particular program. 

You can schedule reports to auto-generate and be delivered to key stakeholders on regular cadence. 

This comprehensive reporting helps identify which enrollment initiatives are working—and which ones aren’t. Think of it as direct insight into what ultimately drives enrollment at your institution. 
If you’re ready for a better alternative to capturing and nurturing leads than the current system your department is using, let’s chat. Contact us to learn more about CRM and MindMax’s enrollment management services.