Customer Relationship Management Platform

The vendor required to provide customer relationship management platforms (CRM) that will enable the college to record interactions with prospective students and current credit and NON-credit students, as well as facilitate communications with them on a one-to-one and one-to-many basis.
- CRM requirements
•    Integrate with the college’s existing oracle PeopleSoft student information system (sis) (e.g., admissions, financial aid, and registrar), Brightspace learning management system (LMS), simplicity accommodate, starfish student alert platform, comevo, maxient, chat ivy chatbot, and WordPress.
•    Provide secure, role-based access controls to ensure appropriate data security and privacy.
•    Include configurable dashboards, reports, and analytics to enable data-driven decision-making.
•    Support bidirectional integration with institutional systems to ensure data consistency and real-time updates across platforms.
•    Enable personalized brand configuration, allowing the college to align system interfaces, templates, and communications with institutional branding standards.
- Technical requirements
•    Support standard integration protocols and data exchange formats, including rest, soap, sftp, and csv.
•    Provide single sign-on (SSO) via the college’s authentication system to streamline user access.
•    Include user-defined field parameters to enable flexible, customized data capture aligned with institutional needs.
•    Incorporate address verification tools to validate and standardize contact information for accuracy.
•    Incorporate mobile or SMS-enabled phone number verification to maintain accurate contact information.
•    Provide a data reconciliation and deduplication pipeline to prevent redundant records and maintain ongoing data integrity.
•    Enabling data duplication and reconciliation to maintain a clean, accurate prospective student database.
•    Enable seamless updates between the CRM and sis through bi-directional data synchronization, ensuring both systems maintain consistent, accurate records.
•    Mobile application or mobile-responsive access for staff and students.
•    Support both email and SMS messaging directly within the platform.
- Business functional requirements
•    Provide branded communication templates that align with the college’s institutional identity and visual standards.
•    Include reusable templates with personalization capabilities to ensure consistent, targeted messaging.
•    Include selective purge functionality for sis-linked or imported records to maintain data accuracy, security, and compliance with retention policies.
•    Support multi-email address capability to maintain multiple contact points for students and stakeholders (e.g., personal, work, and institutional email addresses)
•    Support multi-email address management for accurate routing of communications to multiple addresses per contact.
•    Maintain a comprehensive record of all interactions with prospective and enrolled students, including meetings, calls, emails, text messages, and staff notes.
•    Support both one-to-one and one-to-many communication across departments.
•    Allow segmentation and filtering of contact lists by program of study, enrollment status, demographics, engagement level, and other relevant attributes.
•    Provide configurable workflows and automations to streamline student recruitment, advising, and retention.
•    Allow users to define and modify data fields and workflows to support evolving institutional processes.
•    Enable automated communication workflows, including drip campaigns and nurture sequences for prospective and returning students.
•    Track delivery, open, click, and response metrics to assess communication effectiveness.
•    Allow authorized users to send messages directly from within the CRM interface without using external email clients.
•    Managing inquiries, leads, and applicant records through customizable pipelines.
•    Supporting web-based forms for event registration, information requests, and applications.
•    Providing event management functionality for open houses, campus tours, and orientations.
•    Integration with alumni engagement and donor management systems.
•    Support both automated and manual assignment and tracking of advisors, counselors, and success navigators.
•    Allow documentation of advising interactions, appointment notes, and student interventions.
•    Include early-alert capabilities to identify and support at-risk students.
•    Provide task management and collaboration tools to support coordinated student support across departments.
•    Integrate advising and success data with sis and communication tools via bi-directional synchronization.
•    Facilitate the management of both scheduled and walk-in appointments with providers, including the ability to document meeting outcomes.
•    Notify faculty that a grade roster is missing.
•    Notify faculty that an attendance roster is missing.
- Student functional requirements
•    One email with a living checklist of onboarding steps that updates and provides completion guidance.
•    Track payment status to remind students to make payments and prevent their classes from being dropped.
•    Track tuition balances to remind students to obtain their certificate of residence.
•    Real-time, two-way communication that is documented and preserved.
•    A central place for students to track their application status and next steps. 
•    View documents and emails sent to students.
•    Notify new transfer students that we are missing their official transcripts.
•    Let students know that new transfer credit has been added to their records.
•    Notify recent graduates that their degree has been posted and that a diploma has been ordered.
•    Confirmation that a student has successfully applied to graduate.
•    Let students know that they have been reported as never having attended a class.
•    Notify the student that an i grade has been assigned.
•    Notice to students that a 12- or 7.5-week class is about to begin.
•    Confirms that a course transaction has occurred.
•    Students receive a timely, relevant reply after submitting a form—starting with contact from someone in their program of interest.
•    Students continue to receive helpful nudges and support even after enrolling, including reminders about advising, tuition, and events.
•    Students feel confident they’re receiving genuine messages from the college because communication is clear, professional, and consistent.
•    Allow students to text their counselor directly to ask a question or seek support.
•    Allow students to reply to mass or individual counselor texts.
•    Ability to have students schedule appointments with their counselors through this single platform.
- Reporting requirements
•    Real-time dashboards that display recruitment, communication, and retention metrics.
•    Predictive analytics and AI-driven insights to support student success and enrollment.
•    Provide an AI-powered chatbot that resides on the college’s website and can provide real-time answers by crawling the website, interacting with the sis (utilizing SSO), and accessing manually uploaded information.
•    Customizable reporting tools that enable users to build and export reports using user-defined parameters.
•    Data export functionality to support institutional research and compliance reporting.
•    Communication analytics for evaluating campaign performance and engagement.