Agresso CRM

Agresso CRM has been developed specifically for the post-16 education sector, based upon the experience that Agresso has gained in its close working relationship with this market since 1993.

Initially most colleges sought a CRM system to support their employer engagement activities. Typically, initiated by the college BDU, CRM was seen as a way of tracking college-employer interaction and more recently as a key component of TQS accreditation. With the shift towards demand-led funding the Train to Gain "pot" mushroomed and senior managers recognised that employer responsiveness affected the whole college.

As a result, CRM as a management system is now viewed differently. Not only does it need to support the BDU in its direct relationship with employers, but it has a role in student recruitment generally. Overall, the system needs to support college marketing activities to win more customers, regardless of type, at minimal administrative cost.

The Agresso advantage

Agresso CRM provides college-wide functionality by virtue of its range of application modules. Although being completely integrated within a single database structure, separate modules exist to address separate areas of college functionality. The Business Centre module is specifically aimed at employer engagement, whilst the Recruitment module manages individual learner enquiries. The Marketing module provides campaign management and supports targeted, pro-active marketing to any customer grouping. This modular structure also allows the system to be deployed progressively, something that is vitally important with a system that pervades the very culture of the college and operational processes.

Key components of effective FE CRM

There are four key requirements for an effective, college-wide CRM system:

• Single Customer Record
• Ease of Interaction
• Manage Business Opportunities
• Works for Everyone

Single Customer Record

A major issue for most colleges is that customer information is spread across multiple systems and there is no central Single Customer Record which can be shared by all. This causes many problems internally and dilutes the customer experience. Agresso CRM provides a Single Customer Record which caters for organisations or individuals and works whether the individual is a commercial contact, student or both. All interactions with the customer and future, planned activities are held within this record.

Ease of Interaction

A fundamental requirement of any CRM system is the ability to interact easily and appropriately with individuals or groups of customers. Agresso CRM provides all the interaction options right on the desktop, both from within the individual customer record and where groups of like customers have been identified. For group marketing, targeted marketing lists (based on commercial or student contact details) can be used to promote campaign activities such as Events. All interactions and responses are tracked against the Event and within each Contact record.

Manage Business Opportunities

This will include dealing with incoming enquiries, but also pro-actively generating interest. To support employer engagement and accreditation for the Training Quality Standard, the Business Centre module provides the functionality specifically aimed at staff within the BDU. For the management of individual student enquiries the Recruitment module is relevant for both central and departmental admissions staff and can integrate to the college student management system. The Marketing module supports both types of business support and is a powerful tool for staff within the marketing department.

Works for Everyone

With a single, centralised record, the system must work for everybody. As the following section outlines, modules are available for employer engagement, student recruitment, marketing and the system will ultimately support all customer-facing departments. For staff, the system is easy to use and builds on existing skills and processes. At user level, integration to familiar Microsoft Office applications makes the system immediately familiar and encourages take up. Managers, on the other hand, will benefit from reports and analyses that have been difficult to obtain or absent to-date. Customers will benefit from a more organised approach and be able to interact directly via on-line questionnaires.

How it will help your organisation

The most obvious areas of college activity that can most easily benefit from the use of a college-wide CRM system are as follows:

Business Enquiries - Employer Engagement

This is undoubtedly a growing area of activity for most colleges and a previously overlooked area of revenue generation. Most colleges represent a hugely untapped area of resource for the local business community with their extensive facilities and workforce training capabilities. When dealing with potential business customers the vital ingredients are continuity of contact, an understanding of their needs and relevance of communication. In addition, most businesses present multiple opportunities, but these can only be developed by maintaining the individual details of the staff who manage different functional areas. Whilst most colleges have created distinct departments for this area of activity, collecting this information in a totally separate database fails to take account of the joined-up nature of college processes. The ultimate objective of contact with the local business community is to recruit students onto standard or bespoke courses. Details of most courses are held in the student management system and a record for all student attendees needs to be created there also. It makes total sense for these two data records to be linked in some way. All of these requirements are met by the functionality provided by Agresso CRM and will enable the college to fully exploit this potentially massive growth area of income.

Student Recruitment

All colleges already track course-related enquiries from prospective students, but by using systems that were not designed specifically for this purpose. Even student management systems are relatively poor at providing the targeting and correspondence facilities that are essential to effectively progress enquiries into enrolments. Typically, a variety of piecemeal systems are used by different parts of the college that create "islands of information". One college recently identified 22 separate areas where students' address details were held and it is no wonder that staff become disillusioned with entering this data repeatedly and students fed up with providing it. Without a single system dealing with this vital element of recruitment and future revenues, it is no wonder that the service offered is not as effective or efficient as it could be, regardless of the amount of staff effort expended. This is a classic case of an area of operation that can be substantially improved by the implementation of a more appropriate system.

Pro-active Marketing

Logging and responding to student enquiries is a mainly reactive process, although those enquiries may have been initiated by one or many of the marketing activities employed by colleges to recruit new students. However, many of these enquiries do not progress to enrolments and the enquiry is effectively lost. Using these details to selectively contact previous enquirers provides another useful tool for the college marketing department, especially when considerable background information may have been captured against the individual as a result of the previous enquiry.

The visibility of progression data held at student/course level within the college student management system enables Agresso CRM to target cohorts of students who have reached certain stages of their studies once they have progressed beyond the enquiry phase.

Similarly, the development of the business sector will very largely depend on pro-active contact by the college and the use of targeted correspondence based upon information collected from progressive dialogue with the organisation. An effective CRM system is absolutely essential to manage any form of pro-active, direct marketing in an efficient manner.

Although these are the most commonly identified areas of activity that would benefit from the use of CRM, so far in our discussions with the FE sector, there are many more areas of college life that would benefit from the systematic approach to contact management that CRM delivers. These might include student services, IT helpdesk support, placement and work based learner tracking, additional support assessment, satisfaction surveys, etc.

Further information

If you would like more information on Agresso CRM and how it may help your college, please call us on: 01275 377205.

This website covers UNIT4 in the UK. To discover more about the full range of ways that we can help your organisation, please:

• either explore this section for more about Agresso solutions
• or read more on this website about our FE customers, specialisations, sector focus, services or company
• or contact us to discuss your requirements in more detail.