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What’s Stopping Progress in Higher Education?
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Let’s explore how Full Fabric can help you and your institution.
Before implementing Full Fabric, CBS faced a problem that will sound painfully familiar across higher education: the student journey fragmented the moment it crossed system boundaries.
For Andrew Mellor, MBA Admissions Manager at CBS and someone who's spent years in higher education recruitment across both public and private institutions, this pattern was nothing new.
"In other institutions I've worked at where those systems have been separate, the student journey gets lost no matter how hard you try. It gets lost amongst the different stages."
Marketing tools captured initial interest. A separate CRM managed recruitment conversations. The admissions system handled applications. Each transition point created gaps where visibility disappeared and student experience suffered.
For MBA programmes, where adult learners invest significant sums and expect career-level service, these gaps were problematic. As Andrew puts it:
"MBA students are paying a lot of money to invest in their future, and they need a bit more guidance and a bit more what I would say, like career coaching through that process."
Andrew's team knew which interventions worked, but couldn't deploy them systematically. They understood that personalisation mattered, but lacked the tools to deliver it at scale. Data existed, but it lived in silos.
CBS needed a platform that could support the entire journey in one place, not just automate isolated stages.
CBS selected Full Fabric specifically because it was built for the complexity of higher education recruitment, not adapted from generic sales software. Andrew and his colleagues valued the responsiveness of Full Fabric's customer success team and found them "very, very helpful" in adapting the platform to CBS's specific needs.
The implementation gave CBS capabilities that previously required multiple disconnected systems:
Every interaction, from initial enquiry through to enrolment, exists in a single record. When a prospective student downloads a brochure, attends a webinar, meets CBS at a recruitment fair, or completes an assessment quiz, CBS captures and connects that activity.
Andrew's team can now see the complete context of every relationship, not just fragments.
CBS tracks leads entering through seven or eight different sources, from GMAC platforms to recruitment fairs to website conversions. Regardless of entry point, candidates move into a coherent journey rather than separate workflows.
This unified approach becomes critical at CBS's scale. For the full-time MBA alone, Andrew's team manages tens of thousands of leads at different stages. Without a single system connecting all entry points, that volume would create chaos rather than opportunity.
Different touchpoints trigger different response pathways. As Andrew describes it:
"We have different interventions or touch points with them based on where they are in the journey. Having that entire journey in one place really helps us know what interaction would be most effective with this person."
Someone who's just downloaded a brochure receives different communication than someone who's completed the programme quiz and requested a meeting. Someone who's attended a webinar gets different follow-up than someone met at a recruitment fair.
Not every programme at CBS uses Full Fabric the same way.
Some programmes use it for the complete journey from marketing through enrolment. Others use it purely as an admissions system, plugging in separate marketing tools. CBS configures Full Fabric to match how different teams need to work rather than forcing a single approach.
As Andrew notes:
"It's almost like we are separate activities, and it's been adaptable for that as well."
This flexibility matters because every university has a different structure. CBS needed a system that could accommodate that reality rather than fight it.
When a prospective student interacts with CBS, Andrew's team captures behavioural signals alongside contact information. Downloaded a brochure? Completed the programme quiz? Joined a webinar? Met CBS at a specific recruitment fair?
CBS tags each action, creating a rich profile that informs what happens next. This moves recruitment beyond demographic segmentation to behaviour-based personalisation, and creates the data foundation for strategic decisions about where to invest recruitment resources.
At the end of each recruitment cycle, Andrew sits down and analyses performance by source and geography. Which fairs generated quality applications? Which marketing channels drove genuine interest versus low-quality leads? Which territories showed strong engagement?
"We can go through the territory and see, okay, those sets of fairs work quite well. That interaction, using that quiz, is working really well to capture leads... you can combine your knowledge with data quite effectively."
This shapes where CBS invests recruitment travel, which partnerships to prioritise, and which channels to expand or reduce.
Having better visibility led CBS to communicate less, not more. Andrew's team reduced email volume after identifying which touchpoints weren't generating engagement.
Full Fabric's analytics showed CBS where they were creating noise instead of value, allowing them to cut what wasn't working and strengthen what was.
CBS recognises that different candidate segments need different treatment.
For Executive MBA candidates (senior leaders making significant career investments), Full Fabric handles routine communications and progress tracking whilst freeing staff capacity for high-value coaching conversations. As Andrew describes it, this is less about sales and more about "the coaching part of the role."
For full-time MBA recruitment, where CBS manages tens of thousands of leads at different stages, automation ensures consistent engagement at scale. Candidates receive timely, relevant communication without requiring manual intervention for every touchpoint.
CBS uses Full Fabric for structured, automated pathways when appropriate, and maintains flexibility for relationship-driven interactions when that's what the candidate needs.
Andrew is refreshingly honest about this: the system itself isn't the story.
"Your strategy and your implementation plan of that strategy is more important, but you need a system that works alongside that."
Full Fabric works for CBS because it doesn't impose a rigid structure. Different programmes adopt different approaches based on their specific needs. Some use the full marketing-through-enrolment journey. Others plug in just the admissions components.
Andrew also appreciates straight talk over overselling:
"You do get a lot of other providers promise the world, and at the end of the day, you have to look at your context and be realistic about that of what you actually need."
It's exactly the kind of pragmatic perspective you'd expect from people running complex recruitment operations at a leading business school. CBS needed a platform that could handle sophistication without demanding uniformity.
Copenhagen Business School is one of Europe's leading business schools, known for academic rigour and a commitment to international excellence. CBS operates diverse MBA programmes serving different candidate segments, from full-time students to senior executives.
Like many institutions, CBS needed a platform that could handle sophisticated recruitment operations without forcing every programme into identical workflows. Full Fabric's flexibility enables different teams to work differently whilst maintaining unified visibility across the student journey.
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