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CRM Communications

July 19, 2022

How the CRM Will Support The Work We Do

The new CRM (TriView) will be able to support the work we do and enhance our relationship with students in four primary ways.  See below how each of these four ways will be able to provide benefits to both students and employees resulting in a holistic view and approach to service TCTC students by bringing the most commonly used, needed, and retrieved information to a 360 view in a single interface. 

 

  1. Automat Student Communication Plans

    The majority of current college communications include the same message sent to entire populations of students, often creating just as much confusion as it does helpful information.  Throughout the project departmental leaders will work with the implementation team to design and implement unique and individualized communication plans with individual students based on group, status, needs, and actions.  These plans will be able to be created for entire groups (e.g.; Bridge to Clemson) but communications will only go to the Bridge to Clemson students who need that particular message (missing information documents, success concerns, or kudos).  These plans will also be able to incorporate the use of email, texting, snail mail, and individualized phone calls. 

    The benefit to our students leads to fewer overall communications, but greater knowledge and understanding of their unique needs, requirements, and responsibilities as a student working with individual departments. 

    The benefit to our faculty and staff is that once the communication plans are designed and programmed they simply need to be monitored, but no manual pulling, manipulating, or merging of information is required for them communications to be automatically scheduled and completed on their own.  Small edits and adjustments for future enhancements require no IT involvement and end users will be able to easily edit and control their own communication edits. 

  2. Access Appropriate Student Information

    Faculty and staff from across campus have different informational needs when directly working with students on an individual bases based on the employee’s role.  We currently have the Advising Profile, which is a great tool, but was designed for advising and doesn’t always meet the needs of employees in other offices.  Throughout the implementation process sets of individualized (by role) dashboards will be created for faculty and staff to use when viewing individual student information.  These dashboards will go through design sessions with employees from those roles providing feedback to the team regarding their individualized needs. 

    The benefit to both students and employees is the reduction of time being spent finding information and the ability to connect disparate information impacting individual students allowing easier connections and stronger advising and support outcomes.

  3. Enhance Early Alert and Starfish Functionality

    Starfish is currently being used to support three primary functions: early alert, appointment scheduling, and line management.  Each of these three components will be phased out of Starfish and moved into the CRM.  Over the next two years, we will continue to learn from our current usage, identify improvements and pinch points with our current process to enhance the design and usage of all three into the CRM. After full implementation and cross-campus training, Starfish will no longer be used.

    Robust system integration and programming will result in more real-time progress feedback for students and less manual manipulation for faculty. Currently, the bulk of flags are raised manually by faculty through the completion of two progress surveys for their subsequent courses and sections each semester. With the enhanced capability of the CRM, the bulk of flags would be raised automatically by the system based on student data. This would result in students having the information they need to take appropriate actions to be successful, as well as support staff being better able to help students navigate appropriate resources. 

  4. Identify proactively our Student Needs

    The creation of a high-touch and technology enable approach will allow us to spend less time pulling, filtering, and organizing reports and more time engaging and advising students.  Based on preidentified rules and triggers the CRM will be able to proactively inform experts from counseling, advising, and support staff of necessary outreach and interventions for continued proactive and enhanced intrusive advising and student support. 

The Project Team will be hosting listening and feedback sessions on this information and the plans and impacts this tool will have on the broader campus community.  Please attend one of the upcoming sessions:

  • Tuesday July 26th, Ruby Hicks 220 from 3:30-4:30pm
  • Monday August 1st, SSC 205 from 10:30-11:30am
  • Thursday August 4th, Virtual from 1:30-2:30pm (Click here to join the meeting)

We look forward to seeing and hearing from you soon!


July 12, 2022

CRM Product Selected

The College is proud to announce we are procuring the Target X Salesforce Community College Bundle as its Customer Relations Management (CRM) tool. This CRM platform is specifically designed to:

  • Automate student communication plans,
  • Access appropriate student information,
  • Enhance Early Alert and Starfish functionality, and
  • Identify proactively our student needs.

Our CRM, “TriView,” will ultimately result in a holistic view and approach to serving TCTC students by bringing the most commonly used, needed, and retrieved information to a 360 view in a single interface.  The ‘why’ behind what we do will not change, but the ‘how’ and sometimes the ‘what’ will change through the implementation of this technology.  People remain the core of our competitive advantage as we continue to be a community of “passionate people transforming lives and building strong communities one student at a time.” This platform further solidifies our ability to meet the needs of ‘One Student’ at a time.

 

The implementation, design, adoption, and usage of a major software product takes times and will be completed as a multi-year, multi-phase project. As such we are excited to go on this journey together as a college community.  Our goal is to keep you up-to-date regularly on where we are, and next steps in the project. 

 

Timeframe

It is too early to provide any detailed timelines, but we will start by setting up the technical backend environment and connection to current student systems. Then, our efforts will follow the traditional student life cycle by first implementing the recruitment and admissions functions, followed by the enrollment services and student success coaches, before expanding out to the rest of campus. Each of these phases will include the creation of sub teams made up by area content experts who will be instrumental in the development, creation, and implementation of student engagement strategies for each area.

 

Communication

We are excited to go on this journey together as a college community. The project leadership team consists of Adam Ghiloni, Tasheka Wright, Robin Weaver, and Luke VanWingerden with Jenni Creamer as the executive sponsor. The following webpage (www.tctc.edu/TriView) has been created as a single point of reference for project information, announcements, and updates. Change has been at the forefront of our lives these past few years, and we know that more change is hard, so we are making ourselves available to attend any department or team meetings over the coming months to discuss what a CRM is, provide updates on where we are in the project, and answer any questions. Please submit a meeting request through the CRM webpage and a team member will coordinate schedules. 

 

CRM Goals

The project has college wide goals, benefits, and positive impacts for the entire campus community – faculty, staff, and students. TriView will:

  • Allow our employees to focus more time and energy on proactively engaging and supporting students and addressing student barriers;
  • Combine a high-touch and technology-enabled approach;
  • Increase effectiveness and operational efficiencies when coupled with systemic and cultural shifts;
  • Lead to fewer departmental silos and single employee points of knowledge;
  • Integrate information stored in existing software and technology resources;
  • Limit the number of platforms employees need to access;
  • Present a more holistic view of student information;
  • Track student interactions with offices and employees;
  • Support the prioritization of needs to best use limited time and resources;
  • Automate some messaging and outreach; and
  • Help us achieve our goal of a “single front door,” regardless of the student, program, need, or next step.

 

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.

 

Listening Sessions

Defining requirements and evaluating the needs of the College included more than 30 employees across the campus. We realize others of you may have input, and we want to give you opportunities to share those thoughts. The project team is offering several listening sessions designed to give you an opportunity to provide your expertise. By hearing directly from you, we hope to avoid making assumptions. Plus, we want to be available to you from the start and throughout the CRM journey. We currently have the following listening sessions scheduled:

  • Tuesday July 26, 3:30-4:30 p.m., Ruby Hicks 220
  • Monday August 1, 10:30-11:30 a.m., SSC 205
  • Thursday August 4, 1:30-2:30 p.m., Virtual through Teams

 

A Sneak Peek

You may be wondering what the CRM will actually look like. Target X offers a dynamic and user-friendly tool that both technical and non-technical people can appreciate. Below are a few images of the platform, showing a dashboard, report, advising, and to-do list view.

 

Desktop website insights update

Screenshot of desktop phone recreuitment           screenshot of website desktop and phone retention

 

Student Success Center dashboard screenshot

 

The CRM Project Team thanks you in advance for the hard work and dedication this significant strategic project is going to take over the coming months and years. We are excited to have made it to this step and to begin the work of implementation.