The excitement was palpable. The entire Admissions team, including the Dean of Admissions, was gathered in the office. The din caught the attention of the Vice Dean of the College, who also joined the group.

Was it the first five minutes of the NBA finals?

No. It was time to go live with a new CRM.

For Jill Harman, Director of Admissions at Ohio University’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine (OU-HCOM), one of the most memorable parts of their CRM implementation journey was the “Push the Button” party to officially go live for the first time on the new CRM platform. It was amazing!

“It felt like we were cavemen watching fire for the first time,” said Harman.

A Focus on Speed and Accuracy at Ohio University’s HCOM
In our recent webinar with OU-HCOM, Jill and Kapil Bajaj, Medical Informatics Program Manager, shared admissions best practices on how they automated workflow to communicate more effectively with applicants.

As Jill shared, the title – “Turning Data into Relationships” – is about selecting those students who are a good fit for your institution. Speed and accuracy are of the essence, and Enrollment Rx offered the perfect platform to allow them to collect information on students and respond to them in a timely manner to personalize the entire experience.

Tangible Value
In case you missed the event, here are a few highlights:

  • By transitioning manual tasks to fully automated processes, OU-HCOM cut the time required to receive a completed application from 2 weeks to 2 hours. “That’s life-changing for us,” added Jill.
  • Previously, they could receive up to 75 calls from applicants per day. Once they went live on the new CRM and the self-service student portal from Enrollment Rx, they significantly decreased the volume of incoming calls and equally important, increased the quality of the calls. Rather than simply fielding calls about application or payment status, admissions staff was able to dig deeper, to see if the student was a good fit for the college and build a stronger relationship.
  • “Dashboards changed our lives too,” said Jill. With the Enrollment Rx dashboards, the admissions team can see at a glance where they are with their numbers to easily report to the Deans.

Kapil and Jill also offered valuable advice on how they approached the selection of a new CRM, their business process review and ultimately, the implementation. They shared lessons learned, including leaving plenty of time to internally review business processes, as well as the importance of establishing a strong foundation of internal and external communication.

For more on OU-HCOM’s CRM journey, you can access the webinar replay at your convenience.