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5 REASONS WHY YOU NEED TO MOVE TO AN EDUCATION CRM SOFTWARE

What is a CRM Software?

Before we begin to tell you why education-specific CRM software is your ultimate solution, it is important to understand what a CRM is and what it does.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a software system that helps to unify all communications and data in one place. This is inclusive of streamlining and automating workflows, administrative tasks, tracking contacts, responses, measuring success, and even managing marketing campaigns.

How is regular CRM software different from an Education sector CRM?

A CRM software customized to fit the requirements of the education sector focuses on enhancing the overall student experience as well as easing out the tedious administrative tasks for the institutions. With the education industry becoming a highly competitive market, its CRM systems are also becoming increasingly multifarious. The system has been built to manage your day-to-day operations. An all-encompassing software that takes over student recruitment and engagement improves outcomes and efficiency by automating a lot of the processes across the student life cycle.

How does an Education sector CRM trump your everyday organized spreadsheet?

The Ultimate One-Source Data Hub

You don’t have to go flitting through multiple excel sheets to find the data you need. The CRM software will accommodate up-to-date information about everything within the institution for easy access to anyone within the institution. Student data, admissions information, emails, responses, analysis, reminders, monitoring, and tracking completed tasks and pending jobs are just a few in the sea of information the CRM software will store. Furthermore, the CRM prioritizes data security, a quality a spreadsheet lacks.

Automate Your Daily Administrative Duties

Need to constantly import or export your data from your spreadsheet to various business tools for various purposes and tasks? This is taken care of now. Once again, data storage and tracking prove to be CRM software’s strongest quality. From the tiniest inquiry into the institution through to enrolment, communications, interests, and many other miscellaneous details required for event management or email campaign solutions or any other purpose for that matter – it is all in one place. A CRM will eliminate the process of having to switch between
multiple software’s for different tasks. You can do it all in one place – the integrated CRM software. You can track prospects for different purposes, all within one platform.

Reliable Communication Trail

Imagine having to go back to every email you have sent to thousands of students to track when a communication was initiated and at what stage of the progress a certain student may be at, and then enter it manually into a spreadsheet. Sounds tedious?

A CRM software automizes this process for you by keeping track of every single interaction in chronological order right from emails, calls, tasks, notes, and any other form of engagement used through the student life cycle at the institution.

Standardize The Communication Between the Institution and Students

Let’s face it! Spreadsheets can be cumbersome to browse through and are not really collaboration friendly. Taking on from the data storage aspect of the CRM software, once again, all interactions with an individual are collected and stored by software, allowing you to not only access and share necessary information, but also keep track of notes, assign tasks, and even receive notifications for tasks that require attention. You won’t have to manually keep track of this information on a spreadsheet anymore.

No More Generic Communications

Over a certain period, it becomes a longer drawn-out process to peruse a spreadsheet and send out targeted communication to various students based on their interests. It also becomes easier to send out a bunch of generic messages and hope that one grabs their attention enough for them to engage. A CRM software will effortlessly segregate data based on individual engagement, interests expressed and demographics via the data store through recruitment, applications, and enrolment processes. This makes it extremely easy to target your communications with students specific to their areas of interest.

Say goodbye to the manual work. Do away with those spreadsheets. One pivotal benefit of using a CRM software is its knack for making every single task more time effective. Browsing through or switching between spreadsheets or even importing and exporting data to and from spreadsheets is a time-consuming process. A CRM is a very comprehensive one-stop for any educational institution. With everything you require to ensure a smooth and efficient functioning, centered on one platform, the amount of time and effort saved is remarkable.

TECHNOLOGY IN TIMES OF COVID – and how it helps in boosting education

— VANDANA DEVI SREEJITH

A classroom in 1991:- The teacher walks into the classroom with an armful of books. She greets the class and turns to write on the blackboard. Her students, meanwhile, spend most of their time rummaging through endless books and stationery, trying to find the right ones while half listening to their teacher’s words.

Fast forward to 2020:- The Covid pandemic has hit humanity worldwide. People remain closeted in their homes, hugging on to their lives while shops and schools remain shut. The tech savvy generation that they are, kids happily play on their parents’ gadgets with scant regard for what’s happening outside, while parents and teachers alike fret over the waste of their child’s valuable academic year.

Enter Online Education. A special kind of technology based learning methodology that answers parents’ prayers while alleviating the woes of educators to a great extent. A solution that is a definite win-win for everyone involved, as it is easier to keep the attention of a kid focused on a gadget than on a blackboard. Technology offers unprecedented solutions, and hitherto unexplored avenues to enhance the learning experience, not only for students but also for schools and teachers alike. While animation videos and graphics can be effectively used to teach challenging concepts to smaller children, college going students can benefit from explanatory videos that instruct them thoroughly without the need for a mediator. Technology helps everyone follow the norms of social distancing well by converting face to face classroom interaction to online lectures on video-based digital platforms. Such learning becomes more personalized, as students are now able to tune out distractions that are common in classrooms, learn at their own pace by replaying videos or lectures as and when necessary, and are free from peer pressure to perform well in front of others, thereby bringing back a sense of calm and genuine curiosity to learning.

 

Learning Management Systems developed by experts such as AGAM are now being touted as a one stop solution for schools and colleges alike. Priced reasonably for their end users, it offers customized software that can not only help institutes in tracking admissions, managing fees and monitoring daily attendance, but can also support educators in devising lesson plans, scheduling examinations and handling the daily work flow. It brings a host of benefits over traditional methods of teaching, as LMS based models can ensure more transparency in the parent-school interaction, and facilitate a student guided approach to teaching, that focusses on allowing students to understand concepts deeply, while moving through the pre-designed curriculum at a faster pace.

 

The biggest benefit, however, is how the world of teaching has transformed into one big platform overnight since the advent of the pandemic. Regardless of subject or region, teachers all over the world have taken to conducting classes online, while continuing to interact personally with their students. While teachers enjoy the benefits of teaching across borders or instructing the wards of their competitors, students now have access to a wider range of specialists, from whom they can pick and choose the ones most suited to them. A French student, for example, can choose to learn directly from a native teacher, sitting in France instead of attending French classes within his locality. The rising cases of Covid has encouraged educators around the world to collaborate on teaching methods with the help of technology, and to use digital solutions to refine education to suit modern day sensibilities and values.

 

In short, as our day to day life becomes more and more dependent on technology, it makes sense to digitalize the education sector as well, which is not just the most feasible solution during this global crisis, but is also hands down the best way to introduce our future generation to the miracles of the online world!