With just over 16,000 students, 800 employees, and a diverse range of educational programmes in Oslo, Bergen, and online, Kristiania is Norway's largest independent comprehensive university college, while Fagskolen Kristiania is Norway's largest vocational college. These are large numbers and a lot of data to manage.
From silos to putting students at the center
The school has a mantra: The student at the center. But after mapping the actual student journey, it became clear that students were not as central as the school would have liked. This was the starting point for an exciting project with ProsessPilotene.
“For a long time, we have worked in silos, both in terms of technology and staff, with different departments handling different parts of the student journey. As a result, we have lacked a holistic perspective. When we embarked on this project, our ambition was therefore to break down the silos and gain a more holistic and coherent view of the customer,” says Audun Giske, Director of IT and Digitalisation at Kristiania. He is responsible for putting the digitalisation strategy into practice.
For this journey, they chose Prosesspilotene as their provider, Norway's largest specialist community for Microsoft's CRM platform.
Understanding challenges and opportunities
“Prosesspilotene showed that they genuinely cared about us. The way they understood both the challenges and the opportunities we faced helped us feel confident in them. Once we were also convinced that Microsoft Dynamics was the right system for us, the choice was quite simple,” says Giske.
A senior advisor at Prosesspilotene explains:
– One of the advantages of using Prosesspilotene as a supplier is that we have a large number of clients in our portfolio across a wide range of industries and sectors. This means that we have carried out many identical or similar projects involving common challenges, enabling us to offer targeted, experience-based solutions with accurate resource estimates. At the same time, working with a client whose product is education adds another dimension.
“Our new CRM system has played a major role in opening up the back end, giving those who work with the student journey a much better overview of the big picture than they had before.” – Audun Giske, Director of IT and Digitalization at Kristiania
The value of a successful CRM implementation
Kristiania has always had a wide range of marketing and communication activities, both to recruit applicants and to communicate with current students.
“But Kristiania has never had a typical CRM system that has allowed us to capitalize on important data and make the best possible use of our marketing resources,” says Stein Oddvar Evensen, Director of Marketing and Communications at Kristiania.
– Our collaboration with Prosesspilotene has also prompted us to rethink how we define new customer orientation goals. At the same time, we established an overarching customer strategy as part of Kristiania’s marketing and sales strategy. This describes how we will achieve our goals. This also represents a change for us, requiring us to establish a new organizational structure and culture, as well as new expertise, capacity and systems to support a customer-centric organization. The department is being organized around the customer through the follow-up of strategic projects arising from Kristiania’s overarching goals, as well as continuous learning and follow-up, Evensen continues.
“Previously, we had many different manual services and manually organized insights using Excel spreadsheets. Now, with the shared platform we have built, we can work much more broadly and collaboratively than before,” he concludes.
Data-driven institution
The implementation of the Marketing module in Microsoft Dynamics CE has quite simply transformed Kristiania into a data-driven institution, enabling it to automate several processes.
“Automated processes have made us more efficient, and enriched data gives us much greater scope for action in our marketing and communications activities. With analytics and forecasting, we can scale up and improve precision without a corresponding increase in costs. This is hugely valuable to the way we approach marketing,” says Evensen.
Exciting plans for the future
The digitalisation project Kristiania embarked on in 2021 has had far-reaching effects:
“What’s great about what Prosesspilotene has helped create through this project is that, as an institution, we have gained a much deeper understanding and greater maturity in how to use digital solutions,” says Eriksen.
Kristiania now has major ambitions and visions for how to further develop its digital ecosystem. They are quick to emphasize the value of such a digitalization process:
“I believe the value of knowing your customers is fairly universal,” says Giske.
“Both in terms of being able to make smart, sensible choices, but perhaps most of all to show that you take your customers seriously,” he concludes.
Want to know more?
A comprehensive digitalization initiative
Giske has recognized the need to focus on a number of key factors in order to achieve effective, well-functioning solutions: choosing the right technology and supplier, change management, skills development, process adaptation, and, not least, involving employees at all levels of the organization.
“The value of knowing your customers is, I believe, quite universal.” – Audun Giske, Director of IT and Digitalization at Kristiania.
Cross-functional collaboration
Thanks to its new customized CRM system, Kristiania has now digitized large parts of the student journey—from the marketing activities used to recruit students, through the application process and student life, to the final stage of following up with alumni. Where Kristiania was previously constrained by information silos, it can now collaborate across departments and the organization using a data-driven approach.
