We are all familiar with Excel, and while spreadsheets have several great uses, rows and columns just aren't built for managing prospects or handling customer relations. How can a CRM help manage the process more effectively?

Higher Education Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, unlike spreadsheets, have been specifically designed to manage student relationships and lead management by tracking communication, notes and tasks related to an individual. 

Below are the 5 main reasons why your institution should use a CRM over spreadsheets:

1. One single source of truth 

A modern CRM provides institutions with one single place where accurate, up-to-date information is stored so that anyone in your organisation can access it easily. Information is captured immediately so that there’s never a conflict or loss of information. 

2.  Track communication history

A spreadsheet can highlight when a user first contacted your institution or the most recent interaction, but not much else. A CRM can provide you with a chronological timeline of every interaction including notes, calls, tasks, emails as well as how users engage with your landing pages, events and application forms.

3. Send targeted communications

Nowadays, it is critical for universities to provide targeted communications to their prospective students. In order to do so, it is crucial to effectively move prospects through the recruitment, application and enrolment process and easily segment data based on demographics, interests and engagement. 

4.   Connect your team and foster collaboration

Sure, spreadsheets are shareable, but that doesn’t mean they are a great tool for collaboration. A CRM connects all your team's interactions with an individual and makes it easier to share information, capture everyone's notes, assign tasks, receive notifications when prospects need their attention, and collaborate to move prospects through the student lifecycle.

5. Integrated with other business tools and reduced manual work

When using a spreadsheet, you have to constantly import and export data to other business tools like event management software systems or email campaign solutions and have to manually update a spreadsheet every time a new interaction happens. An integration CRM and admissions platform would provide you with everything you need to track prospects from initial enquiry to enrolment, allowing your team to work within a single platform, instead of having to switch back and forth between multiple tools.