August 15, 2006

RightNow Sells CRM to New Zealand's Victoria University

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

New Zealand-based industry observer Campbell Gardiner has reported that Wellington's Victoria University has "expanded its RightNow CRM functionality with the purchase of sales consoles for the system."

University officials say the consoles will be used for admissions management for international students.

Victoria has operated RightNow since 2004. Gardiner reports that "it is mainly used as an e-marketing tool to recruit prospective students from as far afield as China, Germany, USA and Malaysia."

E-marketing coordinator Charles Brooks says the consoles will help streamline its e-marketing, sales and admissions processes; important in a competitive international student market.

"One of the biggest issues for New Zealand universities is to maintain their international student numbers in a market that's going through a bit of a downturn. RightNow has helped us maintain our market share, and the enhancements put us in a good position to grow that," Brooks says.

Victoria's international website receives around 10,000 user sessions each month and RightNow provides "a timely response" to a range of student enquiries, Gardiner says: "It provides customized and automated responses, online self help and also captures and uses information for outbound marketing purposes."

As Brooks says, "there's no real alternative to e-marketing for us. We can't go and advertise on BBC or CNN and, given we're looking for a tiny result in a lot of different markets, doing local campaigns isn't an option either."

Gardiner reports that "there are 3,000 international students at Victoria University at any point in time; and to maintain an international focus the university aims to have 16 per cent of all students coming from overseas."

Works in America too: Earlier this month Intelliworks, Inc., a vendor of CRM for higher education, announced that Southern Methodist University, The Brookings Institution and University of Washington have all gone live on the Intelliworks CRM platform.

Frank R. Lloyd, Associate Dean, Executive Education SMU Cox School of Business, said they selected the system because "it was purpose-built for executive education programs, and it is being used by other top business school programs."

In a single system, "we can communicate with people as they progress from prospect to registrant to participant and past-participant," says Lloyd. And in this case, "past-participant" means "alumni who will be supplicated for donations for the rest of his natural life."

In May Intelliworks announced the launch of a new version of its enterprise product specifically designed to meet the CRM needs of "small to midsize schools" as well as "individual programs and departments."

In April Intelliworks sold its iRM CRM product to Willamette University's Atkinson Graduate School of Management for help in managing recruiting, admissions, career services, and “several key operations processes for its Full-Time MBA, Professional MBA and Executive Development Programs,” according to Intelliworks officials.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

(source: http://news.tmcnet.com/news/-university-crm-zealand-rightnow-/2006/08/15/1794978.htm)