The State of Using CRM at Vietnamese
Higher Education Institutions

Đọc bài viết tiếng Việt tại đây.

These results are parts of my research “The State of Using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems in the student Recruitment Phase at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)”.

Following the last articles “Customer Relationship Management & Customer Knowledge Creation” and “Customer Relationship Management in Higher Education Institutions”, this article describes the research of the state of using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in Vietnamese Higher Education Institutions. We will find the answers to the questions:

• “What are the types of CRM systems which have been used by HEIs in the Student Recruitment phase?”
• “What are the types of customer knowledge which have been created by HEIs during the Student Recruitment phase with the support of those CRM systems?”
• “What are the perceived benefits for HEIs to use CRM systems in the Student Recruitment phase?”.

Table of Content:

A. Research Methodology

B. Research Results

C. Research Conclusion

D. Research Limitations

E. Ideas for Future Research

***

A. Research Methodology

The primary technique used to gather data was a semi-structured interview. This non-standardized method enabled the interviewees to freely share their opinions and experience in a conversational flow on a predetermined set of themes and open-ended questions. The use of CRM systems of each university was shared by one staff of their Marketing or Communications teams, or by a manager who managed the Marketing and Sales activities. Most participants of this study took on multiple responsibilities, including marketing, consulting, and managing their CRM systems. Hence, their interviews could be sufficient to provide answers to the research questions.

Three participants were working to recruit students for their undergraduate programs. The other two were for their postgraduate programs, which were taught and monitored by foreign universities from the United States of America and Europe. The next table describes the overall characteristics of their universities or the programs the participants were working for. 

The results of the interviews will be discussed and analyzed in the next section.

B. Research Results

1. CRM system types in Vietnamese HEIs

RQ1: “What are the types of CRM systems which have been used by HEIs during the Student Recruitment phase?”

The following table describes the CRM systems of all organizations. The systems were categorized into three types of CRM (collaborative, operational, and analytical). The collaborative systems were for the university staff to contact and communicate with their prospective customers and other team members across different departments and regions. The operational systems supported the organizations in automating some of their marketing and sales activities. And finally, the analytical CRM systems were used to store and analyze customer data. The systems which were mentioned by four or five participants (80% or 100% of occurrences) were highlighted.

1.1 The common choices for collaborative CRM systems Although each organization had different ways to interact with their customers in the Student Recruitment phase, they almost used the same platforms to support their communications. Those common collaborative CRM systems were websites, email, social media, and Over the Top (OTT) messengers (e.g. Facebook Messenger, Viber, Whatsapp, Google Hangout, Kakao Talk, and Zalo). Those tools helped organizations share information and also collect information from their customers. For example, they used the forms on their website to collect registration information, sent e-newsletters or event invitations via emails, and talked or chatted with their customers using OTT messengers applications (besides using phones). Those collaborative CRM systems were the main tools for the universities to create customer knowledge in the Student Recruitment phase, and they were mentioned most frequently in the interviews, as shown in figure 4.1 below.

Besides those common choices of systems, there was a clear difference in terms of the tools for storing, sharing, and analyzing customer knowledge. One group of organizations solely used Google applications for those purposes. And the other group used CRM software instead. The next two sections discussed those two groups.

1.2 The common uses of Google Sheets 

Besides “email”, “Google” was the term used most frequently by the participants. Out of five interviewees, three (1U, 2U, 5G) shared that they relied heavily on Google Sheets for collaborative and analytical purposes. Remarkably, organization 4G had two offices in the north and the south of Vietnam. And while the southern office used Zoho CRM, a Software as a service (SAAS) application, their northern team only used Google Sheets. This tool was used by the organizations as a place to store, share and analyze customer knowledge. And the dominant reason for this choice was its ease of use. 

“Google Sheets is very easy to use. We don’t need to know a lot of techniques to use it. Even our students and academic staff can handle the software. Our professors are not good at technical things, so online excel is the most effective tool for them.” – Participant E. 

Google Sheets was the primary analytical CRM system for those organizations, in spite of the fact that they also had other CRM software to store customers’ data, as in the cases of organizations 4G and 5G. Even though their self-developed CRM software or their SAAS software had the same functions, their employees still chose to use Google Sheets instead. This redundancy could be considered a waste of investment.

Moreover, those organizations’ CRM systems were not connected. And they have to manually transfer customer data from one system to another for their team members to perform their tasks. That was the case of organizations 1U, 2U, and 5G. They had different tools for their sales, marketing, or IT teams to use in the Student Recruitment phase. And that disintegration took the universities time to facilitate the cooperation among various departments.

1.3 The use of CRM software 

Only organization 3U and the southern team of organization 4G used CRM software (either self-developed or a SAAS application). And their software had the capabilities of operational CRM systems. For example, organization 4G used automated emails to send reminders to people who registered to join their events. And organization 3U was the only organization to integrate the operational CRM systems into their sales and marketing activities. Their call center, automated email marketing, and automated short message service (SMS) were linked with their central CRM software and could be controlled at one place. Convenience aside, this integration also helped them in the customer knowledge creation process because their CRM software automatically collects some information about their interaction with the customers.

“If we send out a message via Call Center, SMS, or email, the software automatically stores the content of that message, along with the sending time.” – Participant C.

In their study, researchers Khodakarami and Chan concluded that Operational CRM systems’ contribution to the customer knowledge process is low. The researcher reached the same conclusion because four out of five participants shared that they were able to collect enough customer information to do their work via collaborative CRM systems, and they did not rely on operational CRM systems to do so. But from the example of organization 3U, the researcher argued that operational CRM systems could still be beneficial for HEIs in terms of saving time for the process.

Moreover, organization 3G’s CRM software played the roles of collaborative, operational, and analytical CRM systems at the same time. This integration helped them save time from manually transferring customer data from one place to another. In addition, their software also helped them gain further benefits such as managing tasks of team members and automate certain parts of their recruitment process, such as sending automatic emails or allocating leads automatically.

2. Customer Knowledge Types

RQ2: “What are the types of customer knowledge which have been created by HEIs during the Student Recruitment phase with the support of those CRM systems?” 

The researcher categorized the collected customer knowledge into knowledge about customers, from the customers, and for the customers. A detailed list of customer knowledge can be seen in the table below. The knowledge which was mentioned by four or five participants (80% or 100% of occurrences) was highlighted.

2.1 The existence of a set of required customer knowledge for HEIs

All the organizations needed to have the basic information of their potential customers or leads to start the consultation process. In the beginning, they needed the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of those people. After that, the employees could call the leads to collect more information, including the addresses (or location in general), birthdays or birth years, past study results, programs of interest, and motivation. All of that information would be then inputted into the collaborative and analytical CRM systems. And multiple team members or departments could access and update those data while doing their tasks.

However, there were some distinct differences between the customer knowledge of undergraduate and graduate programs. The graduate programs also collected information such as working experience and English certificates while the undergraduate programs needed to know the income level of their potential customers. Those types of knowledge helped the universities to categorize the leads to provide appropriate communications later on. 

Regarding knowledge for customers, the common information was the offline events, tuition, and application process. Although all the organizations already provided such information on their websites, their customers still asked about them. And by listening to what the leads already knew about the programs and their questions, the program consultants of organizations 4G and 5G could also determine the chances that those people would register and become their customers. Leads’ potential and leads’ source were the essential knowledge to their marketing and sales process.

2.2 The importance of leads’ potential and leads’ source

Besides basic information about customers (e.g., names, phone numbers, and email address), leads’ potential level and leads’ source were mentioned most frequently in the topic of customer knowledge.

“Leads” were defined as qualified “prospects” who would be contacted by the sales executives. But within the scope of this study, all the participants used “leads” as the names for all the contacts they collected and could be converted into their students or customers. Moreover, they sorted their leads into different categories, depending on their potential to become customers. 

“On our CRM software, we can also see the potential levels of our leads, which are high, medium, and warm. Those levels are determined by our consultants accordingly to their conversation with the customers.” – Participant A.  

This categorization was done mostly by the sales executives or program consultants, using the information they gathered about the customers. 

“Our online registration forms also ask our customers about their interested majors, their locations and the names of their high schools. If they studied in private schools, they might have better paying capability. People who are living in big cities such as Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh city also have higher potential levels than people who are living in other places. Those pieces of information are all inputted into the systems to help identify the potential levels of the leads and to determine the appropriate ways of approaching them.” – Participant C.  

According to the participants, leads’ potential was a vital knowledge to their jobs. It determined the treatment the leads would receive from the universities. For example, employees of organization 5G only invited highly potential leads to their office to discuss directly. Those leads could also join Skype meetings with their Academic Officers to have a better understanding of the professors to consider joining. And organization 4G only invited high potential leads to join their information sessions. This kind of categorization and treatments helped the organizations to prioritize spending resources on people who were more likely to be converted into customers. 

The organizations also recorded the source from which the leads came from such as Facebook or Google Search to determine the effectiveness of those channels. This knowledge helped the organizations to understand where they performed well in terms of investing organizational resources to generate new leads. 

“One of our most important pieces of information is the lead source. By looking at the report, I can understand which channels are the most effective ones to invest more budget into.” – Participant C.  

That type of knowledge could be created quickly using analytical CRM software as in organization 3U. Or the organizations could analyze their data using spreadsheet software. The managers of those universities could then review this information and adjust their budget allocation to the channels accordingly. The ability was described by Polona and Iztok (2018) when they stated that CRM systems could help universities to improve traceability by generating reports about the sources of prospective students. 

Furthermore, leads’ source could also be a determinant of leads’ potential. As participant E said that upon reviewing the data, her team recognized that leads that came from social media channels such as Facebook have more chance to be converted into customers than leads provided by the leads-generation agencies.

2.3 The lack of knowledge from customers

The lack of knowledge from customers could take away its benefits for HEIs. Among three types of knowledge, knowledge from customers has the strongest relationship with the speed and quality of innovation for organizations. By not creating this knowledge, HEIs were missing out on the chance to develop their innovation capability.

The researcher also argued that the main reason for this absence was the context, which was the Student Recruitment phase. This was the time when HEIs focused on letting their target audience know about them, become their leads, and then get converted into customers. Hence, the universities mainly collected knowledge about customers to approach their leads and provided knowledge for customers to satisfy the leads’ needs of information. If the boundary of this research was extended to the latter phases, the researcher assumed that HEIs could share how they collected knowledge from customers in the form of customer feedback. And those inputs could help the organizations to improve their products and services to gain better competitive advantages. 

This finding demonstrated the lack of integration between the department in HEIs. There was a clear line of responsibilities where the marketing and sales teams ended their responsibilities and passed the newly created customers to other departments such as customer service or academic departments to handle. Only participant A said that she asked her students about the living conditions abroad. And then she shared the stories and advice she had heard with her potential leads in the consultation sessions. But she only did that because customer service was also a part of her responsibilities.

3. The Benefits of CRM Systems for the Student Recruitment Phase

RQ3: “What are the perceived benefits for HEIs to use CRM systems in the Student Recruitment phase?”

When asked about their level of satisfaction with their CRM systems, the participants gave their rating as in the table below. 

Except for participant B, who gave an average score because she expected more from her universities’ CRM systems, the other participants had a rather high level of satisfaction with theirs. From the interviews, the researcher composed a list of 14 benefits of CRM systems for the Student Recruitment phase. Those benefits were drawn from the direct question “What are the benefits of your CRM systems?”, or from the follow-up question “How would your job be affected without such systems?”, or the participants explicitly stated that they use their systems for some specific purposes. The table below describes the list of benefits along with their number of occurrences. The benefits which were mentioned by four or five participants (80% or 100% of occurrences) were highlighted. 

The researcher categorized the benefits into four main themes. But each benefit could belong to more than one theme, as could be seen in the last column of the table above. The next table summarizes the themes and associated benefits. The presentation and discussion for each theme are presented in the next sections.

3.1 Theme 1: Effective Collaboration 

All the participants emphasized the importance of CRM systems in their teamwork. First of all, the systems were used to share data among team members. Customer information was available for many people to work on at the same time.  

“Google Sheets is very convenient for us to share, update, and add new information. We can also use Google Drive to store pictures and videos.” – Participant B. 

The collaboration could even take place remotely. For example, in the case of organization 1U, the team in Australia could also access the data to work on their own without being affected by the time difference between two countries. The ability to cooperate from many locations also allowed organization 5G to leverage their external resources. 

“Sometimes, we hire part-time students to help us screen the candidates. Without the online excel program (Google Sheets), we might need to wait for them to come back from their holidays to send us the files. With that tool, we can just go to the shared files to look for the information we need instead of waiting.” – Participant E. 

The cooperation was not limited to one team but could take place between multiple departments. 

“After each call, our consultants input the collected information into our systems, along with their potential level. This categorization helps us send them appropriate emails. For example, we only send an invitation to join the Information Session to the most potential leads.”  – Participant D.

Participant C also said that their CRM software also automatically recorded the dates and messages of the emails and SMS which were sent to the leads via their software. With the inputs of multiple people and from multiple sources, the customer data on CRM systems became more complete. Different members could cross-check the accuracy of the information and make adjustments if needed.  

“Different people from different departments can access customer data and make sure that the information is correct and up-to-date, especially the information related to payment status. If anyone modifies or deletes any information on the system, he or she needs to share the reasons for others to know.” – Participant A.  

This theme showed that CRM systems enhanced the organizations’ ability to create knowledge by fostering three stages of the customer knowledge creation process: Socialization (communicate with leads and with other team members), Externalization (storing customer information instead of leaving it as tacit knowledge), and Combination (merging customer information from different sources and people). Khodakarami and Chan (2014) had more specific conclusions such as analytical CRM systems were the most useful for the Combination stage. But that type of analysis was not within the boundary of this research and could be conducted in future studies.

As all the data about each customer stayed in one place, team members could have a “whole picture” of each customer. This advantage gave the universities the subsequent benefits which were to be discussed in the next sections. 

3.2 Theme 2: Increased Personal Productivity 

Collaborative and analytical CRM systems helped the users save time from collecting data or looking for information. This finding supported Khodakarami and Chan (2014)’s research.  When people submitted their information on the organizations’ websites, it would be stored in their database. In the cases where they used Google Sheets, the users would need to manually export and import those data from their websites onto the online excel files. This step took time, but it was still better than typing information of each lead onto the systems. Then the employees could perform the “search” function to quickly look for the customer knowledge they needed on the database. For example, participant A could use the sorting function to find all the leads which were marked as not qualified to join their programs this year yet to follow up next year.  

And one of the most important benefits of using CRM systems in the Student Recruitment phase was the ability to identify the leads’ potential levels to prioritize contacting the most probable leads first and to have different treatment for different categories. This advantage was mentioned most often in the interviews, as shown in the figure below.

3.3 Theme 3: Improved Customer Experience 

Customer Experience Management (CEM) has become the focus of many organizations. In their survey, Gartner found that in 2016, 89% of companies were expected to compete on the ability to deliver good customer experience because it could drive business results. A study of Forrester Consulting concluded that customer-experience-driven firms could grow their revenue 40% faster and increase their customer lifetime value more than 60%. And as the participants shared, CRM systems also helped them improve their customers’ experience.

By having all the information about each lead at one place, team members could have a complete picture of each potential customer and the ability to personalize their conversations using what they knew about him or her. It helped improve the quality of their communications and could also improve their business performance. At the very least, the program consultants could avoid causing dissatisfaction by not asking for information which the prospective customers already provided during their past interactions with the university. 

“If one of our customers visits our office without an appointment and his dedicated consultant was not available, I can just go online to see the content of our previous conversation with him. I don’t need to ask him for the same information which he already provided. That would lead to a waste of time and could cause a nuisance to our customers.” – Participant E. 

Moreover, the participants also shared that providing knowledge for the customers was also a way to maintain relationships with them. And their CRM systems helped them with this task.

“Our recruitment time is rather long, from March to November. We need to keep contacting people who already registered and provide new information or to invite them to join events. Or else, they might decide to cancel before studying.” – Participant E. 

3.4 Theme 4: Increased Organizational Performance 

As discussed above, by increasing personal productivity and improving customer experience, universities could increase their organizational performance. But the collaboration benefit would also directly lead to an increase in their business result. The organizations’ CRM systems could generate reports which helped them gain an overview of their performance.  

“Every three or six months, we generate a report to let us know how many people we have helped to study abroad, how many canceled or returned and why. Without such systems, it would be very hard to understand our work performance.”  – Participant A.

HEIs could analyze the sources of their leads to understand the effectiveness of their investment into different channels. And then they could adjust their budget allocation accordingly to improve their ability to generate leads. According to participant C, his CRM software also helped him generate reports about the performance of his team members such as numbers of leads generated every day, the number of leads consulted, and the conversion rate. This knowledge was essential for him to adjust the marketing and sales strategy, or to provide individual coaching for each employee. These features demonstrated that CRM systems could also help the organizations in the Internalization stage by providing “learning and awareness opportunities”.

Moreover, organizations which had been using CRM software instead of Google Sheets for collaborative and analytical purposes could gain some other benefits such as saving time with the automated communications and managing the tasks of their team members.

“We also set up some automatic workflows. For example, we can send an email to 10,000 people. Then only the people who open that email will automatically receive an additional email or SMS to help them understand us more. – Participant C.

3.5 The relationship between the themes 

By analyzing the data, the researcher concluded that there was a causal relationship between the themes above. The next diagram describes this relationship.

As could be seen, effective collaboration was the main cause of the increase in personal productivity, customer experience, and organizational performance. And the increased personal efficiency and improved customer experience also contributed to the increased organizational performance. For example, by combining the knowledge about prospective customers from many sources into one place, the organizations could gain a thorough understanding of their leads. That benefit helped the consultants to prioritize contacting the most potential leads first to convert them into paying customers. They also wouldn’t need to ask for information that the customers already provided and could personalize their conversation to improve the customers’ experience. Hence, the CRM systems saved the organization time, and also their business would be better because their customers were more satisfied with their services. Moreover, the collective knowledge about their customers also supported the organizations to understand their business perform better and adjust their strategy accordingly.

C. Conclusion

By synthesizing the data of all sections, the researcher concluded that all the universities had been using some tools as their CRM systems in the Student Recruitment phase. However, although there were some common collaborative CRM systems such as websites, email, and OTT messengers, their primary systems were different. Most of them had Google Sheets as their main collaborative and analytical CRM systems. Even though they might have other tools for those purposes, Google Sheets was still their preferred system because of its ease to use. But the downside of using Google Sheets was the manual work to transfer the data from one place to another. There were organizations that used self-developed or SAAS CRM software as their integrated collaborative, operational, and analytical CRM systems. The main benefits of using such CRM systems in the Student Recruitment phase were effective collaboration, increased personal productivity, improved customer experience, and increased organizational performance. The collaboration was the main cause for the other three benefits. And the increase in personal productivity and customer experience also helped improve organizational performance. Moreover, organizations that used CRM software instead of Google Sheets gained additional advantages such as saving time from manual data transferring, automating some steps of their marketing and sales activities, and finally the ability to manage tasks of their team members.

All the universities focused on creating knowledge about customers for their recruitment purposes. The common set of customer knowledge included names, birthdays or birth years, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, programs of interest, motivation, previous interaction with the universities, leads’ sources, leads’ potential, offline events, tuition, and the application process. Moreover, leads’ source and leads’ potential were vital to their recruitment process, as they enabled the organizations to prioritize their resources and categorize leads for different communications approaches. There was a lack of knowledge from customers. And this absence could cost the organizations the chance to improve their innovation speed and capability.

D. Research Limitations

This study has several limitations. First of all, the primary research methodology (semi-structured interview) could contain interviewer bias and interviewee bias, in which the interviewer’s belief, behaviors, and interpretation of the interviews might affect the quality of the data. The researcher was aware of those biases and tried to limit their effects by asking open questions and using follow-up questions for clarification and examples. Furthermore, the researcher improved the robustness of this research with data triangulation by using the internet as a secondary source of information to validate the data which was collected in the interviews. In addition, the small size of the population and the fact that all the participants are from the same country could also affect the research results. Hence, future research on this area is encouraged to expand the size of the samples and improve the variety of the participants to increase the generalizability of the findings. 

E. Ideas for future research

The first idea for future research is to measure the impact of using CRM systems on the performance of HEIs in the Student Recruitment phase. Instead of exploring the perceived benefits of the participants, the researcher can conduct a quantitative study to determine the relationship between using CRM systems and the increase of revenue or the reduction of cost per new customer acquisition. Another research direction is to take an action research approach to explore how different departments of HEIs could leverage CRM systems to add values to their students at various stages of their life cycle. And the final direction is to fully replicate the work of Khodakarami and Chan (2014) to determine the 3-way relationship between different types of CRM systems, customer knowledge, and stages of the customer knowledge creation process. The result of that study could help HEIs to improve their design of CRM systems and marketing and sales activities to collect and leverage customer knowledge more effectively.

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