University improves customer experience and CRM technology

Client background

This university is located in the Midwest and serves over 75,000 students across the six campuses, e-Learning and extension services.

Business challenge

In an ever increasingly competitive environment for top students, this university was lagging behind its peer group in increasing graduation and degree completion rates, and reducing the number of “stop outs.” In addition, students, faculty, staff and other constituents were expecting communication and interaction that would be seamless between functional areas. The constituents were increasingly frustrated, (as evidence in surveys conducted by the university prior to the Baker Tilly engagement) by the multiple disconnected touch points.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly engaged a cross functional, cross discipline team of over 120 individuals from 40 different collegiate entities at the university to participate in a visioning and strategy project. The project defined various constituent personas engaged at the university. Baker Tilly then defined and analyzed the needs of these various personas and led the team to create mission and vision statements across the constituent life cycle of: awareness, recruit, enroll, support, transition and stewardship. These mission and vision statements became the foundation for future state process work as well as CRM requirements definition.

Specifically, Baker Tilly:

• Engaged a large cross functional team from the university
• Defined a future state for constituent relationship management
• Defined the future state experience model for university constituents
• Defined the detailed requirements for supporting CRM technology
• Developed the business case to support the investment (people, process and technology)
• Worked closely with the executive steering team to position the initiative to the board of regents
• Helped gain approval from the board of regents

In the first year of the deployment of the strategy and CRM technology over 75% of the collegiate units engaged in the project and adopted the CRM foundation and model.