Oracle Updates PeopleSoft Higher Ed CRM Application

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 12/08/09

Oracle has updated its institutional customer relationship management software to bolster event management capabilities. PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM release 9.1 for Higher Education also includes improvements in personalized recruiting and a new service center module.

A higher ed CRM application typically provides functionality for identifying student prospects, establishing contact, generating and maintaining interest in enrollment, and forging a relationship during the recruiting process and afterward, when the student actually attends the college.

A new event management module in the Oracle product is intended to help institutions plan and execute virtual and in-person events. Features include support for online event registration, wait-listing, early bird pricing, and credit card integration.

Version 9.1 of the software allows users to set up "high touch" one-to-one recruiting with tailored prospect and inquiry management processes. The new release integrates out of the box with Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions, a suite of administration applications, to provide users with more data about an individual. For example, institutions could identify students with risk indicators like a drop in grades or a change in financial situation and target them with personalized retention programs. The integration between the systems also enables staff to complete transactions without having to leave one program and open up another one.

"Retention and time-to-graduation are critical components at the University of Central Florida to successfully serve our student population," said Elizabeth Hale, director of enterprise application development in Computer Services & Telecommunications at the Orlando university. "It has always been a challenge to identify the early warning signs of a student who might be having trouble. We are looking forward to the new release of PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9.1 for Higher Education to provide us immediate and accurate visibility into problem indicators and to generate appropriate communications and actions to reach out to the student and alert advisors if in-person measures are required."

The latest version includes a service center module that serves as a single constituent contact center for both IT and general campus issue resolution. The service center is embedded with up-to-date constituent information pulled from PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions applications, enabling a customer service or help desk agent to better understand the user, anticipate his or her service needs, and, presumably, resolve issues more quickly.

"It can be challenging to provide academic support in a large, decentralized campus with a burgeoning student population," said Toronto's Ryerson University Associate University Registrar, Ken Scullion. "We expect that using [the new release] will assist Ryerson to provide a virtual one-stop academic support solution that will reduce the anxiety, frustration and stress levels of students. CRM also has the potential to provide efficiency benefits to academic support staff in the management of their responsibilities."