Putting  people's needs at the heart of an International School Group's CRM decision

We worked with a global independent educator with schools in over 80- countries as well as a handful of purely online schools. They wanted to understand how their global admissions experience could be improved for staff and parents and how to translate this into a CRM specification that would deliver efficiency and standardisation.

Our client wanted parents to have easy, friendly admissions experiences that would encourage them to choose these schools for their children. They also needed staff to work more effectively and efficiently with parents;  they were on an acquisition trail and legacy technologies and admissions practices were proliferating with each school acquired.

Their priority was to choose a CRM to support global admissions processes before being overwhelmed by maintenance costs, multiple licenses payments and an increasing divergence in admissions practices.

It was great to work with a client who understood that before standardising working practices, it was important to identify best practice across the group. It was equally important to find out where diversity needed to be supported due to differing local or regional needs. Working out what to mandate, and how much to allow local decision making is a common problem for large organisations.

Our client had trouble co-ordinating management information, ensuring efficient working practices, managing training costs or planning for scale without this.

We designed an online global Discovery programme to answer these questions. We held interviews, workshops, and surveys as well as the odd physical UK school visit. A challenge was to get under the skin of staff and parents and to find out what was right for them and for the business too. Our research engaged all the schools and built a sense of ownership in the outcomes amongst admissions staff. This was important as there were many views about the right way to manage admissions. Our recommendations would inform a major CRM investment, so they needed to be accurate, confident, and clear.

Admissions Officers effectiveness is primarily measured through customer conversion and retention.

A main objective was to discover how the admissions process could be improved for admissions staff. In doing this, we found a technology-irony that often exists when business systems are designed without their user’s involvement.

This is that staff put so much effort into managing systems intended to help them that they become tied up in administration, reporting, workarounds and aligning technologies, to the point they lose sight of their real objectives. They had no time to build and nurture parent relationships (the area in which they could make a difference to the business) and conversion was struggling.

Our deliverables pointed at a CRM solution to fix this.

By working closely with the schools and the business and listening carefully to what was said, we found best practices across the admission process from enquiry to enrol. We mapped variations in practice across all schools and the tech they were using and created a Global Current State Matrix.

We created a Journey Map showing current state admissions processes, detailing snags and pain points and opportunities to do things better – marking where practices varied across the globe.

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We created an eco-system visualisation illustrated the complexity of the Admissions Officer tasks, showing all touch-points and how information flowed across schools. This made a clear case for the re-allocation of specific functions away from the admissions team  to others in the ecosystem such as staff, parents, and tech. We combined staff needs, priorities and technology competencies across the globe (gathered through workshops and surveys) with what could and couldn’t be standardised, to provide prioritised recommendations which were mapped to an Ideal State Service Design BluePrint.

Most parents want the admissions process to be personal and flexible, linked to their child’s needs and driven by a sincere interest in their child’s best interests, not those of the educator. We talked to parents around the world to find out how admissions could be improved. We looked at what they loved and what they didn’t and what they’d like to change. We uncovered the things that influence parent’s decisions and worked out how to mitigate their concerns and how this varied according to local and regional differences. For example:

• We found parents differed in the emphasis they place on academic vs pastoral ‘fit’ for their child according to region. We also found win and lose factors in staff behaviour, for example parents place a huge emphasis on face-to-face visits, on having the head address their child directly when they meet, and if the admissions officer remembers details of the minutiae of their circumstances from initial discussion to visit.

• On the other hand, the positive impression created by a warm child-centred welcome at a visit can be unravelled by a business-centred demand, such as a letter insisting on an early deposit to secure a child’s place at the school.

• We found tensions between school behaviours and parent needs, such as the tendency for some schools to insist parents were ‘qualified leads’ on paper before they were invited to visit, whereas other schools believed the best route to qualification and conversion was through a physical visit (this was confirmed by parents).

• We found differences between parent-types and were able to develop needs-based personas to reflect these. Such as between parents new to the independent sector; parents who were familiar with independent education and parents who were moving country and school.

The pandemic added new levels of complexity to the process, but also delivered some unexpected benefits as parents and staff became more familiar with video-mediated meetings.

Alongside personas, we delivered compelling opportunity maps describing the parent journey, showing how to  enhance the parent experience from Initial enquiry to Joining. We showed how parents and staff needs could be met by a CRM that supported new ways of working for individuals and through actively supporting collaboration and self-serve between parents and staff.

Our insight and intelligence enabled our client-sponsor to establish they were on track for the wrong CRM, and to pointed towards a better fit.  Our reporting was sufficiently authoritative and compelling to allow them to persuade the board to change tack and go with a better solution.

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An immediate benefit of this work was delivered in identifying a CRM able to meet the needs of all stakeholders . Even greater benefits will be revealed over time as the CRM scales to support the growing organisation with a need for flexibility at its core.

Many organisations have a history of enterprise technologies that have failed to deliver on their promise, however each pound spent by our client in this procurement exercise will save hundreds in the longer term as the capex costs and organisational implications of re-work, tailoring, patching and ultimately the almost inevitable abandonment of an inappropriate technology are avoided