TriView

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, which is a platform for storing and managing prospective, applied, admitted, and enrolled student information (contact info, history, plans, and goals) — all in one central location. But it’s not just a fancy contact list. A CRM solution is one of the most valuable, game-changing pieces of business technology available because of the ways a platform like TriView it can use that information.

The College recognized long ago the need for greater technology platform integration and holistic student data and support. As such, CRM discussions have been happening over the past 10 years. Significant foundational structure, integration, and process improvement was needed and is now completed, setting the stage for a successful CRM implementation. A CRM will facilitate relationships through the organization of and efficiency in communications, processes and workflow. It will enable us to share information across departments, ultimately resulting in a holistic view and approach to serving our students by bringing the most commonly used, needed, and retrieved information to a 360 view in a single interface.

Our CRM will allow our employees to focus more time and energy on engaging and supporting students and proactively addressing student barriers. Currently, targeted outreach efforts include extensive manual work that is both time-consuming and time-sensitive. Combining a high-touch and technology enabled approach, TriView will reduce significant administrative burden through increasing effectiveness and operational efficiencies leading to fewer departmental silos and single employee points of knowledge.

Everyone! Students will receive personalized, specific, and just-in-time communications, and benefit from increased ease of navigating educational structures, communicating and engaging with campus employees, and accessing their own personal data. Faculty and staff will benefit through the reduction of administrative burden when communicating with various student populations and advising and building relationships with individual students. By integrating information stored in existing software and technology resources, TriView will limit the number of software tools employees need to access, present a more holistic view of student information, track student interactions with offices and employees, support the prioritization of needs for effective use of limited time and resources, and automate messaging and outreach.

A CRM works in two primary functions. First, it is a communication tool allowing for dynamic, specific, and timely communications to students without the manual efforts required to send every single communication. Second, a CRM brings together data and information from multiple tools into a single user interface, providing a more holistic student view, as well as task and to-do functions, placing students who need support front and center of advising and counseling staff/coaches. 

An industry leading platform, TargetX has invested significant resources in research and development and the design of best practices with a unique understanding of individual college needs. Using the 80/20 rule (80% baseline/20% customized) the platform leverages best in breed technology and practices with the flexibility to meet TCTC’s unique needs. Throughout the implementation phases, the project team will be working with process owners to determine best practices and adjustments to current process, while maintaining our unique “one student at a time” vision.

We will be able to provide better student service with a CRM through:

1. 1. enhanced contact management tools, a complete view of all students, and the delivery of excellent customer service in a timely manner through any communication channels our students choose;
   2. process automation to simplify the student experience in navigating complete organizational structure; and
   3. relief from administrative burden in collecting information and communicating with diverse student populations, allowing faculty and staff to spend less time looking information up and more time with students.

The CRM project will be going through a multi-year, multi-phase implementation. Please refer to the current implementation roadmap at tctc.edu/TriView.

There are four main elements that have the potential to derail this project. Those include failure to properly estimate effort, failure to control scope, failure to dedicate the right internal resources and/or failure to invest time and effort to getting user adoption and buy-in. The structure developed for this project has taken each of these items into consideration and designed to minimize the risks. The project team’s ability to say yes, or need to say no, will likely be rooted in one of these risk factors.

A huge benefit of CRM is automating routine, yet time-sapping tasks, which saves countless hours. This allows more time for advising, support, and teaching. For example, say you want to send an email follow-up as part of your department’s advising efforts.  With a CRM you won’t have to remember or manually look up a major or even fliter by students who have or haven’t been advised or registered. You simply create a campaign with a few simple rules (built by end users) to automate the outreach efforts like email, text, and call options. Relationships will be nurtured across students and faculty/staff through these personalized, dynamic, timely communications.

A CRM platform makes the same information accessible across the wide. This means almost any student-focused activity can be better and more easily coordinated — within and across departments, from recruitment to advising to support services. Also, because student information and activity are updated in real time, every employee is always working with up-to-the-minute information on students and our interactions with them, like stages in the student lifecycle, missing requirements, or notes and communications sent and received by other departments.

An industry leading platform, TargetX has invested significant resources in research and development and the design of best practices with a unique understanding of individual college needs. Using the 80/20 rule (80% baseline/20% customized) the platform leverages best in breed technology and practices with the flexibility to meet TCTC’s unique needs. Throughout the implementation phases, the project team will be working with process owners to determine best practices and adjustments to current process, while maintaining our unique “one student at a time” vision.

As excited as we are for this tool, it is important to recognize that TriView cannot be all things to everyone. It will not generate organization or reporting structure changes, it will not fix bad data or poorly designed processes, and it will not solve all problems and frustrations. It will certainly help in major ways, but it is important to realize that it is not a silver bullet. Additionally, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics are current buzz words across high education. While a CRM will improve the College’s access to information and decision making, TriView is not designed to perform artificial intelligence or predictive analytics actions, and as such, will not perform these functions in a traditional or literal sense.