The SIS vs CRM Interplay
There are many recent, and increasingly urgent, trends around technology in Higher Education. Two related, and sometimes competing, trends I’ve seen bubble up in my most recent conversations are:
- University leaders know they need to do something to improve and create a better digital experience for students
- Many are also looking to upgrade or replace their current Student Information System (SIS) in the next 3-5 years
Neither of these feel like light lifts! Both are considered critical to the success of your institution.
What do you do?
This is an opportunity for CRM to meet your institution’s digital transformation needs in ways that Student Information Systems are simply not designed to.
According to this Tambellini 2021 report on Student Systems in Higher Education (summarized here for those without registered access), 2020 showed a dramatic slowdown in SIS investment. Institutions instead turned their focus on HR and FIN system replacements. With all the challenges outlined in this Inside Higher Ed article, it’s no wonder there is a growing pause on SIS replacements. If you’ve been looking at SIS to drive your digital transformation strategy, I would encourage you to re-evaluate your prime objectives with a new SIS platform. Decide if your return on investment is where you think it will be. I am not saying your SIS doesn’t need to be replaced or upgraded, I just want to make sure you are doing it for the right reasons.
Consider Salesforce CRM to address the urgent demands for improved student experience. I’ll bet you already have Salesforce in some capacity on campus, probably several instances, where you are not getting the most out of your investment. You should be treating Salesforce as your enterprise engagement platform – a core part of your student, staff, faculty engagement strategy in a sea of other business-critical enterprise platforms.
Getting Started: Understand Design Intent
I heard a respected University CTO say that it’s important to understand capabilities of the systems in your technology stack in order to assemble a solid and cohesive enterprise platform strategy.
Of course, I agree. I think it’s important to not only understand current capabilities, but also design intent of the systems you are assembling. This depth of understanding will help you map the technology to your business strategy in a way that aligns with future roadmaps as well. (Vendors will #safeharbor their product roadmaps, and you should be careful making any purchase decisions based on yet-to-be functionality, but I firmly believe that a fundamental way to make the most of your investment is to understand the core design intent of any platform you build on.)
I’ve heard growing curiosity for how CRM interplays with other critical systems on campus. Most recently the questions have been swirling around CRM and SIS – where does one end and the other begin? It’s easy to say one is your “SIS” and the other your “CRM”, but with the line between systems becoming increasingly blurred with rapid changes to their own technologies, the gray area between gets bigger and seems to overlap and compete.
The true functional overlap between CRM and SIS is minimal. They both serve students, but they don’t do the same thing.
SIS: Student Lifecycle Data Management
A SIS is designed to support data administration for policies and processes around things like financial aid, tuition calculations, enrollment, and managing legal contact information. They are the systems for heavy processing and calculations and, for many universities, they provide the source of truth for regulatory and compliance reporting. They are typically very admin-centered and, in my opinion, feel like heavy extensions of the standard HR and FIN modules that are core to many student administrative systems.
However, and through no lack of effort or investment, there are some areas where these traditional SIS platforms are not quite meeting the needs of many universities today. Especially around this whole digital experience thing. Most critically:
- The ability for bi-directional communication
- The flexibility to pivot quickly in the face of change (hi, Covid)
- The need to be mobile-first (or at least friendly)
All of these are critical to any digital transformation or enterprise engagement strategy.
Enter CRM.
CRM: Student Lifecycle Engagement Management
A CRM platform like Salesforce provides a layer for managing engagement and interactions with your constituents. It consolidates data and extends functionality from other systems to serve new and evolving needs. And it can do it quickly and flexibly.
For example, Salesforce may not be the system calculating FA eligibility or compliance, but it can notify a student of a compliance or paperwork issue and prompt them to take action. With minimal integration providing financial aid or related enrollment hold status, Salesforce CRM can provide an avenue to address the issue through self-service knowledge articles, live agent support chats, case management, and payment portals.
Another example is emergency notifications. I once had a customer in the south tell me the process for sending out a tornado warning to students on campus. Long story short, it took almost a week to assemble the list students and faculty expected to be on campus and blast an email through Outlook. By the time the email was sent, the tornado warning was over and classes were already back in session. Two storm seasons later, with Salesforce as an aggregated source of basic contact and enrollment information, a closed-campus message went out within 2 hours of the weather service issuing a warning for the region.
The Interplay
You engage with constituents across all pillars of your organization – from recruiting and enrollment to student and career services. You are developing corporate partnerships across your student, staff, and faculty constituent base. Your engagement platform is as critical as any other enterprise system, and its integration with other enterprise systems even more so. These engagements lay the foundation for your institution’s long-term success, and your strategic engagement strategy should be supported by an enterprise CRM platform.
If you’ve made the decision to move forward with enterprise CRM on campus and not sure where to go next, contact us for a chat.