Career-minded students consider Westwood College for degrees in business, design, justice, health care, or technology. But how could Westwood achieve an ideal “student concierge” experience—the personal touch in a virtual world?

PROFILE
Westwood College’s mission is to prepare students and lifelong learners for professions in high demand industries. Denver-based Alta College, Inc., is the parent to a system of higher education institutions that include Westwood College, Westwood College Online, and Redstone College. With 14,000 students enrolled, Alta operates 20 campuses in California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Texas, and Virginia. Alta also owns Test Services, Inc., the largest global franchisee of The Princeton Review.

CHALLENGES
Westwood’s goal, to improve each student’s personal experience during the enrollment process, hinged on choosing the right customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Westwood’s technology team worked with admissions, marketing, and other departments to define the ideal requirements—with the student’s experience as the cornerstone. But legacy systems and call center servsices presented significant obstacles.

To achieve a truly “customer-friendly” model, Westwood was pursuing a centralized concierge model to orchestrate its enrollment services. Under Segar Annamalai, CIO, the institution focused its evaluation of CRM on two key parameters. First, the CRM’s functionality had to be geared to the unique nature of higher education—involving academics, the transfer of credits, fees and aid, and other complexities not found in the business sectors that first embraced CRM. Second, the platform had to meaningfully integrate with an existing admissions portal, several third-party recruiting vendors, legacy student information systems (SIS), and an IPbased call center solution. Response time was also a leading priority. Westwood understood that working adults and tech-savvy students place a high value on timely, personal responses. Inquiries from the Internet, advertising vendors, or toll-free lines needed to be aggregated, de-duplicated, and automatically assigned to an available representative—in minutes or seconds, not days or hours.

Westwood’s cross-functional team went further to unfold detail upon detail of a vision for closed-loop communications using letters and mailings, e-mails, and return telephone calls—with every action
dependent upon a range of factors: the date of inquiry, area and depth of interest, status in the process, and so on. Next came the academic and technical complexities. The new CRM needed to
complement the higher education life cycle. Beyond marketing, Westwood’s CRM would support non-traditional and traditional programs and terms. Moreover, it must be interoperable with Westwood’s Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) call center and existing student administrative applications.

SOLUTION
With their documented requirements and work flows in hand, Westwood reviewed a number of CRM suppliers, including Salesforce.com and Talisma, and selected Campus Management Corporation.
“Campus Management impressed us with their focus on higher education,” stated Mr. Annamalai, “their deep knowledge of automated student recruiting, and the openness of their application to interface with our student system and call center. They offered a superior product.” Campus Management introduced a Web-based interface and deployed its application to more than 400 desktops. Admissions representatives quickly grew proficient with the system—and integration across legacy systems narrowed or eliminated tedious manual data entry and batch processing. With the new work flow in place, admissions was capable of setting administrative wheels in motion within minutes or seconds of an inquiry. Students experience seamless care from admissions to financial aid and other departments.

RESULTS
Westwood’s laser focus on one theme—superior responsiveness— drove the project from end to end. By leveraging Campus Management’s robust CRM and its open technical architecture, Westwood introduced concierge-class services to students. “Students are pleased with the ability to be quickly directed to the appropriate admissions representative,” said Mr. Annamalai. The technology group’s intradepartmental approach resulted in wide-ranging benefits for executives and staff as well. Westwood’s marketing executives gain insights into where students best suited to the programs are coming from, in terms of their source, cost-per-start and other criteria. Faculty and advisors track students from inquiry through graduation and placement, receiving alerts that help all concerned stay on track.

For more information on Westwood College, visit www.westwood.edu.