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Feature
A Lesson in Interactive Marketing
By David Baum
DePaul University manages
information—and students—with
PeopleSoft Enterprise technology.
Customer relationship management (CRM) has made significant inroads at commercial firms, where companies use the software to help acquire, nurture, and retain loyal customers. Just as for-profit business ventures and other organizations intent on gaining market share value customer retention, educational institutions value student retention. That's why DePaul University is using PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM software from Oracle to better understand how it can serve individual students and identify the ones who may be at risk of dropping out of the university.
"Our constituents are using Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Online Marketing solution to help improve the overall student experience through interactive, two-way dialogues," explains Audrey Bledsoe, CRM Craft team leader at DePaul. "By leveraging integrated e-mail and Web technology within the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM application, we achieved a 4 percent lift in retention of students in the STARS [Students Together Are Reaching Success] program. For example, we engaged at-risk students during the winter break, a time when loss of contact with staff and connection to the university contributes to student attrition."
DePaul, the largest Catholic and eighth-largest private university in the nation, serves more than 23,000 students, who reflect a broad diversity of ethnic, religious, geographic, and economic backgrounds. The university began its PeopleSoft Enterprise implementations in 2001, with PeopleSoft Enterprise Student Administration, part of PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions suite. With its PeopleSoft Academic Advisement, Campus Community, Recruiting and Admissions, Financial Aid, Student Financials, and Student Records modules, PeopleSoft Enterprise Student Administration helps DePaul manage all of its student services and business operations more efficiently.
Meanwhile, parallel implementation teams also deployed PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management and PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management applications. In 2004 DePaul upgraded its PeopleSoft Enterprise applications to the Web-based version (version 8) and implemented PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal to simplify access to both PeopleSoft Enterprise and non-PeopleSoft Enterprise applications, using single-sign-on procedures. All PeopleSoft Enterprise applications are installed on Microsoft Windows servers, and the PeopleSoft Enterprise databases are running on UNIX servers in conjunction with Oracle9i Database. "We are a total PeopleSoft Enterprise shop, running all of our mission-critical applications on the Oracle Database platform," says Bledsoe.
Boosting Student Retention
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Snapshots
DePaul University
www.depaul.edu
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Employees: 4,251 faculty and staff
Industry: Higher education
Oracle products and services: Oracle9i Database; PeopleSoft Enterprise modules, including PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, PeopleSoft Financial Management, PeopleSoft Human Capital Management, PeopleSoft Online Marketing,
PeopleSoft Support, PeopleSoft Performance Management, PeopleSoft Portal, and PeopleSoft Supply Chain Management
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In October 2003, the university began using PeopleSoft Online Marketing version 8.8 in support of its STARS program. PeopleSoft Online Marketing, part of the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM suite of applications, is designed to help organizations acquire, attract, and retain customers through the planning and execution of interactive campaigns. DePaul's Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, a department within the Student Affairs Division, runs the STARS program. The focus of this program is to create a positive first-year
experience for students of color. Program administrators match students with peer mentors who help them accomplish their academic, personal, and professional goals. If peer mentors identify a student in crisis, they take the problem to the appropriate person to resolve the issue.
DePaul's first e-mail campaign included a survey that identified students who were experiencing stress during their first year. Campaign administrators received an impressive 50 percent response rate to the survey. They used the information to identify students who were considering transferring or dropping out of the university. DePaul's CRM team then sent a second e-mail message to program administrators, complete with information about the students and their particular stressors. This information enabled the staff to intervene and get many of these students back on track to a successful academic career.
The success of the STARS program has generated interest in CRM at DePaul; several academic schools and administrative units within the university are now using PeopleSoft Online Marketing to create their own campaigns. "We look for ways to make it easier for faculty and staff to take advantage of our services—to ultimately improve experiences with students while working with us," says Bledsoe. "Students are responding, and the university community is very enthusiastic about adopting the CRM philosophy and technology. They're already thinking of new ways to communicate and reach out to students."
Leading the Way to Innovation
According to Vince Kellen, vice president of Information Services at DePaul, the relationship a university cultivates with its students is far-reaching—for both the students and the institution. Kellen says it was the university's firm commitment to its students—combined with a unique entrepreneurial outlook—that prompted DePaul to use CRM technology in this way. "The university chose to implement PeopleSoft Online Marketing because we saw the capability to introduce this two-way dialogue with students as missing from the higher-education landscape," he explains.
Higher-education institutions that deploy CRM technology, as DePaul is doing, will have an easier time meeting their enrollment objectives in the years ahead. "Higher education institutions with prospect-focused (CRM) enrollment management systems in place by 2007 will have a competitive advantage in meeting their enrollment objectives though 2011," notes Gartner in a recent report on higher education. "These strategies provide a benefit to prospective students as their expectations increase due to a rising level of sophistication about online services and their ability to interact with organizations through the internet." ("Higher Education Evolves," Gartner ID Number: G00124082, November 2004.)
Better Support for Students, Faculty, and Staff
Of course, using the PeopleSoft Online Marketing technology is just one facet of DePaul's far-reaching strategy to improve its ability to respond to the needs of faculty, students, and staff. For example, in a related effort, DePaul's Technology Contact Center support organization partnered with the CRM Craft to deploy PeopleSoft Support, part of the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM family of products. The new contact center combines e-mail and online chat into a common medium, enabling everyone in the support organization to deliver superior service. "CRM Support served as the foundation for a multichannel communications framework that puts us in closer touch with the needs of our customers," says Matthew Kemp, an application developer in the CRM Craft.
The new Contact Center is just one aspect of a larger initiative called the Constituent Interaction Center—which includes Agent Worklists, E-mail Response Management, and chat functionality and will eventually include voice-over-IP calls—and integrates DePaul's technical support ticketing system with the university's Web portal. "We're using PeopleSoft Enterprise technology to deliver more information to our analysts, so they can better assist customers and attain a higher rate of closure when students, faculty, or staff call in with problems," says Harold Woods, Jr., technology contact center manager at the university. "DePaul personnel and students are able to enter self-service tickets via PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, now that the PeopleSoft Enterprise Support software is in place."
Already, the Technology Contact Center is increasing cohesion among various channels while making support analysts more efficient and responsive. For example, in case a projector or a computer goes down in a classroom, DePaul offers a 15-minute response time for repairing or replacing the unit. "We've seen dramatic increases in quality of service as a result of deploying this software," continues Woods. "Our success rate for responding to classroom emergencies in 15 minutes or less has risen from 60 percent to more than 90 percent."
Tying It Together with Oracle
DePaul is creating a data warehouse that will store data from many PeopleSoft Enterprise applications in a common, Oracle-based operational data store. Once the warehouse is complete, authorized personnel will be able to create reports through domain-specific business intelligence dashboards.
"We're tying it all together with Oracle," concludes John Miller, an application developer and ERP business analyst in the CRM Craft. "Ultimately, all of our CRM surveys will be stored in this data warehouse, along with important transactions and communications from other enterprise applications. This will put us one step closer to staying in touch with students and meeting their academic, social, and personal needs."
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Fusing Enterprise Applications
As DePaul University moves ahead with its organizationwide deployment of PeopleSoft Enterprise applications, IT professionals at the university foresee new synergies with the Oracle product set. "From what we have seen, Oracle has a very stable team, and it looks like the Oracle/PeopleSoft merger is going to be beneficial," says Harold Woods, Jr., technology contact center manager at DePaul. "After attending a recent PeopleSoft user conference, a lot of our worries about future support for our PeopleSoft applications melted away."
One of the items discussed at the conference was Oracle Fusion, Oracle's technology road map for integrating heterogeneous software applications and business processes. "Oracle has always had a very strong technology backbone and robust applications," maintains Fred Studer, Oracle vice president of applications marketing. "Oracle Fusion is about blending applications and technology to provide significant business value. We want customers to know that we're going to protect their investments and that we're also continuing to innovate all product lines."
Oracle Fusion Middleware, which includes development tools, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Collaboration Suite, and Oracle Data Hubs, is an important part of the Oracle Fusion strategy. Studer says the blending of Oracle's strong database and technology background with its expanding application set allows the company to provide new capabilities to PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers, such as the ability to orchestrate diverse business processes better and more simply, using industry standards such as XML. At the heart of Oracle Fusion are detailed specifications for using Web services, an enterprise service bus, and Oracle BPEL Process Manager to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
According to Thomas Kurian, Oracle's senior vice president of Server Technologies, Oracle plans to certify PeopleSoft Enterprise and JD Edwards applications with Oracle Fusion Middleware before the end of the year. "Customers can use Oracle Fusion Middleware to support their entire enterprise, including Oracle and non-Oracle business applications," he notes. "The objective is to simplify the integration of heterogeneous applications and data."
DePaul's John Miller is intrigued with the potential of Oracle's Data Hub products, a key part of Oracle Fusion that allows organizations to synchronize information from multiple business systems. "Data quality is an ongoing concern for an institution of our size," says Miller, who works as an application developer in the university's CRM Craft. "I can see a lot of benefits from using Oracle Customer Data Hub. For example, we have several systems that need to be integrated that aren't part of the PeopleSoft Enterprise suite, and the [Oracle Customer] Data Hub could make it easier to keep student information in sync."
Using Oracle Customer Data Hub, DePaul may be able to establish a more accurate and consistent view of prospective as well as attending students, whether information about those students arises from packaged, legacy, or custom applications. Miller believes reconciling all the dimensions of student identity would result in less data movement, fewer integration projects, better data consistency, and standardized access to enterprisewide information. "This could be a fantastic way to get everybody on the same page," he adds.
Now that Oracle has combined the Oracle and PeopleSoft support organizations, DePaul's IT and development staff has one point of contact for questions or problems. Matthew Kemp, an application developer in the CRM Craft, points to technical synergies resulting from the Oracle/PeopleSoft merger that will benefit DePaul's Information Services department. "We utilize Java as a learning language in our curriculum for our School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems," he notes. "Oracle's reliance on this language and the company's insistence on maintaining an open architecture provide new learning opportunities for our staff and student workers. As we move forward with these Oracle products, we'll see a natural overlap in our computer science curriculum."
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David Baum (david@dbaumcomm.com) is an independent technology writer based in Santa Barbara, California.
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