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Volume 17
Issue 4
December 2019
HEC256

From Students to Alumni: Implementing CRM to Build Lifelong

Relationships at HEC Montréal – Part A
Case 1 prepared by Gregory VIAL, 2 Pierre-Majorique LÉGER, 3 and Romain POURCHON 4

Increased competition for students, mandates to improve student outcomes,

and the benefits of increased alumni engagement are three prime examples
of drivers pressuring higher education institutions to adopt customer
relationship management across the entire student lifecycle. Institutions are
turning to CRM solutions to help them organize, automate, and improve
interactions with current and future students as well as alumni.
— Terri-Lynn Thayer, VP – Education team manager at Gartner 5

A changing market in the higher education sector

Since the early 2010s, the higher education sector had felt growing pressure to keep up with
changing labour market trends and learner expectations:
• A more precarious economic outlook in many Western countries had created a more fragile
labour market, where the loyalty of employers and employees was declining. Professionals
had to navigate a complex labour market, where the skills they acquired as undergraduates
might not last them their entire career. 6 They were thus expected to update their skills as
they simultaneously balanced their work and family lives.
• Globalization had increased the mobility of workers and students, leading to a surge in the
number of business schools 7 as well as a strong increase in exchange programs and
international admissions, especially at business schools.

1 The events described in Part A took place between 2012 and 2014. Exhibit 1 presents a brief timeline of key events described in
the case.
2 Gregory Vial is an assistant professor in HEC Montréal’s Department of Information Technologies.
3 Pierre-Majorique Léger is a professor in HEC Montréal’s Department of Information Technologies.
4 At the time of writing, Romain Pourchon was an M.Sc. student in Information Technologies at HEC Montréal.
5 https://www.gartner.com/document/3204717?ref=solrAll&refval=216564818&qid=b5c0fb9c58b85893089bb196
6 https://www.utoronto.ca/news/millennials-employment-public-health-challenge-u-t-expert
7 In the United States, the number of postsecondary Title IV institutions increased from 3,231 in 1980–1981 to 4,627 in 2014–2015
(more at https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84)
© HEC Montréal 2019
All rights reserved for all countries. Any translation or alteration in any form whatsoever is prohibited.
The International Journal of Case Studies in Management is published on-line (http://www.hec.ca/en/case_centre/ijcsm/), ISSN 1911-2599.
This case is intended to be used as the framework for an educational discussion and does not imply any judgement on the
administrative situation presented. Deposited under number 9 65 2019 001A with the HEC Montréal Case Centre, 3000, chemin de
la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Montréal (Québec) H3T 2A7 Canada.
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From Students to Alumni: Implementing CRM to Build Lifelong Relationships at HEC Montréal – Part A

• Distance learning, originally offered by traditional institutions to a minority of students

registered in specific programs, was being reinvented with the emergence of online learning
platforms. Massive open online courses – MOOCs – allowed learners to complement their
skill set by taking courses for free or for a nominal fee to earn a certificate of completion. 1
• Students expected digital technologies to play an important role in their relationship with
their schools. Although emails were still widely used, a growing number of students
maintained ties with other people and organizations using social media and other digital
channels that enabled more direct dialogue between participants.

Within this changing environment, higher education institutions had to devise new ways to build
and maintain strong relationships with prospective, current, and past students. To that end, many
were looking at best practices and technologies adopted by traditional organizations facing similar
challenges with their customer base.

HEC Montréal in 2012: A French-speaking business school in a changing

environment
Founded in 1907, HEC Montréal (Hautes Études Commerciales, or Higher Commercial Studies)
was the largest French-speaking business school in North America. 2 It was located in the heart of
Montreal (population: 1.7 million in 2014), the largest city in the province of Quebec, Canada. The
school adhered to five core values: rigour, relevance, boldness, respect, and commitment, and its
mission3 stated that:
HEC Montréal is a French-language institution solidly rooted in its community and open to the world.
It is an international-calibre university business school that contributes to our society’s prosperity by
providing leadership in all its spheres of activity, i.e., teaching at all levels, research and serving the
community.

While affiliated with a parent institution, Université de Montréal, HEC Montréal enjoyed a high
degree of autonomy in terms of its strategy and operations. In 1996, the growing school inaugurated
a second building, and in 2012, it launched an ambitious financing campaign to help fund the
construction of a third building in downtown Montreal. An in-depth look at key facts and figures
showcasing the diversity that characterized HEC Montréal is found in Exhibit 2.

Funding in Quebec’s higher education sector

The Ministère de l’Éducation et de l’Enseignement Supérieur du Québec (Quebec’s Ministry of

Education) was responsible for funding institutions of higher education, 4 including HEC Montréal.
The maximum number of students that a school could register was based on its physical footprint
(i.e., number and size of classrooms). As with other Quebec universities, the fees charged by HEC
Montréal for standard programs (e.g., bachelor’s, master’s) were established by a mandated

1 In 2013, Coursera, one of the leading MOOC platforms, reported more than 5,000,000 users, while its competitor, edX, reported
just over 1,000,000 by the end of the same year. In subsequent years, these offerings expanded to include multiple-course, fully
accredited programs, often through a combination of distance-based and on-premises learning.
2 See https://www.hec.ca/en/about/our-history/index.html for more on the history of HEC Montréal.
3 https://www.hec.ca/en/about/choose-hec-montreal/mission-vision-values.html
4 http://www.education.gouv.qc.ca/en/universites/professeurs-et-personnel-duniversite/quebec-policy-on-university-funding/

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From Students to Alumni: Implementing CRM to Build Lifelong Relationships at HEC Montréal – Part A

mathematical formula rather than by market forces. The school was not free to decide on tuition
fees for what were referred to as “public” (traditional) programs. Although this policy was designed
to ensure that education remained accessible to all, it could create difficulties during economic
downturns or when universities requested fee increases to deal with higher operating costs. 1

The student lifecycle at HEC Montréal

To support its operations as a teaching institution, HEC Montréal relied on a variety of functions,
or “services.” Each service handled a specific aspect of a student’s lifecycle at HEC Montréal,
whether they were contemplating studying at HEC Montréal, currently studying there, or had
studied there in the past. 2 Figure 1 illustrates the growing complexity of the student lifecycle as a
result of ongoing changes in the higher education sector.

Note: solid arrows represent the traditional lifecycle of a student at HEC Montréal following a standard
program (e.g., undergraduate, MBA). Dashed arrows indicate additional programs that a student may
follow throughout their entire career.
Figure 1. Student lifecycle at HEC Montréal

The Office of the Registrar

One of the most important points of contact for prospective and current students was the Office of
the Registrar, the main service managing the creation and maintenance of student records. All
student information regarding grades, course registration, graduation, personal information, course
sections, and other relevant information was managed by the Office of the Registrar and stored in
PeopleSoft, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Over the years, PeopleSoft had been
tailored to work with the school’s business processes. While core processes (e.g., payroll, human
resources) were the same across all services and departments, a number of other processes were
more loosely defined and could be adapted as necessary. Interactions with the Office of the
Registrar took place in one of three ways: email, phone, or in person.
• When prospective students contacted the Office of the Registrar, an employee took notes
about their inquiry (e.g., type of question, program[s] asked about, and follow-up email
address) and saved them in an Excel spreadsheet. Every week, those notes were forwarded
to Recruiting services. They couldn’t be saved in PeopleSoft because that system couldn’t

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests
2 There are ten student-facing services at HEC Montréal staffed by about 220 employees. In this case study, we focus on seven
services that are key to CRM implementation.

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From Students to Alumni: Implementing CRM to Build Lifelong Relationships at HEC Montréal – Part A

store data about students who didn’t yet have an HEC Montréal student ID. After searching
the school’s website, prospective students often contacted the Office of the Registrar to
request information they could not find online. Students interested in graduate studies
sometimes contacted professors directly to inquire about research interests, available
funding, and other specific issues. Following those interactions, professors might advise
prospective students to apply to a program, but the Office of the Registrar was not informed
of those discussions.
• Unlike prospective students, current and returning students already had an HEC Montréal
student ID. Upon request (e.g., a student wished to register for a restricted class, change a
billing address, or credit a course), staff at the Office of the Registrar could log into
PeopleSoft to perform the required actions on the student’s behalf. In such instances,
however, there would be no record of the student’s request once it had been handled.

Although this process worked fine for students, it could create challenges for Recruiting services.
The Excel spreadsheet might contain errors (e.g., mistyped email addresses). The spreadsheets
didn’t always follow a standard format, making it difficult to import information in bulk for
analysis purposes. Finally, not everyone at the Office of the Registrar had the skills to use Excel
effectively. The usefulness of the notes could thus vary.

Recruiting services

Headed by Michel Lemay, Recruiting services had several objectives, all of which focused on
enticing the best students to register for HEC Montréal programs. The services’ primary mission
was to follow up on inquiries received by the Office of the Registrar. Based on notes taken by its
staff, employees contacted prospective students, asking them whether they had all the information
they needed to make a decision and promoting HEC Montréal as their best option. In this way, they
sought to engage with candidates to nurture relationships that would convince them to become
HEC Montréal students. These efforts could take time to produce results, however. It was not
uncommon for prospective MBA students to contact HEC Montréal two or three years before they
finally applied to the program. Recruiting services, therefore, had to keep its contact lists to ensure
that regular follow-ups were done to maintain the school’s relationship with prospective students.

Another important component of the services’ mission was to attend education fairs 1 around the
world to promote the school and answer questions from international students in person. In this
case, prospective students provided their contact information on paper, and staff members later
input the data into Excel spreadsheets similar to those used by the Office of the Registrar. Although
education fairs could yield positive results in terms of establishing relationships with prospective
students in some markets (e.g., China, India), the school’s budget for attending them was limited.
Given the fierce competition among institutions of higher education, deciding which fairs to attend
was an ongoing challenge.

Recruiting services was also in charge of maintaining the school’s online presence. This involved
launching recruitment campaigns via email or on social networks (e.g., LinkedIn), understanding
how people landed on HEC Montréal’s website and how they searched for information once they

1 e.g., http://www.nationaleducationfair.com/n/en/home/

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were there, and holding webinars where prospective students could watch interactive presentations
of the school and its programs and ask questions in real time. Here again, decisions had to be made
about how best to use HEC Montréal’s limited recruiting budget to ensure the best students would
apply.

So far, efforts to coordinate those initiatives had proved unsatisfactory. As mentioned, the data
collected by human agents (e.g., staff at the Office of the Registrar) was not always accurate. At
education fairs, information was also taken down on paper before being entered into a spreadsheet,
creating further opportunities for error. Finally, the selection and management of recruitment
channels was often based on habit and intuition rather than hard evidence. The school might hold
an open house at the same time as its parent institution, Université de Montréal, for example,
without questioning whether the day and time of the open house was suitable for the school’s
clientele. Finally, Recruiting services gathered no data on students who didn’t end up registering.
There was no way to know why some people decided not to attend HEC Montréal, but that
information could have proven invaluable to efforts to attract those “lost” students (e.g., by
adapting course schedules in some programs). Overall, the fragmentation of those interactions
created silos across the student lifecycle at HEC, making it impossible to generate a comprehensive
overview of the process.

Student services

Student services was in charge of ensuring that new students felt at home. It helped students gain
access to financial help, housing services, and psychological support as needed. It also helped
students connect with student associations, facilitated exchanges with other schools, and facilitated
the integration of international students and locals with the HEC Montréal community.

In line with the breadth of their mission, staff in the various subunits composing Student services
relied on different tools to perform their duties. Although most of those tools included Excel
spreadsheets, no single tool had been configured to centralize data and fulfill all existing needs. In
addition, most of the forms and information managed by Student services were in hard copy form
and kept in paper files. The information gathered by Student services was isolated within the
subunit where it was collected and did not cross into PeopleSoft, nor was it shared with other
services. This made it impossible for the twenty-some employees working for Student services to
access a complete profile of any student to follow up on any special accommodations they might
need with other subunits or other services.

Alumni services

Like Recruiting services, which stayed in close touch with prospective students until they had made
a decision, Alumni services was responsible for establishing and maintaining contact with students
after they graduated. Among other activities, Alumni services organized networking events to help
graduates in their job search or to reconnect with classmates. In 2013, the service entered a
transition period, with personnel changes (including a new director) and a new strategic direction.
Rather than seeking to re-establish contact with alumni that had graduated years ago, the service
now focused on creating ties with graduates as soon as possible. They hoped this more proactive
approach would make it easier to maintain this contact over time.

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One of the challenges facing Alumni services was keeping contact information current. In an ideal
world, they could have sent targeted communications to alumni groups based on factors such as
geographic location, graduation year, or completed programs or degrees. HEC Montréal’s recent
opening to the international community had made this more difficult, however. Graduates’ career
paths had become much more convoluted, and the mobility of the modern workforce made it more
difficult to keep track of them. Both snail mail and email addresses changed frequently. Although
every new student at HEC Montréal was given a permanent HEC Montréal email address, it was
not uncommon for students to stop using that address after they graduated. As a result, Alumni
services couldn’t be sure their communications were reaching their target audiences.

To help keep alumni’s contact information up to date, staff used Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT, a
cloud-based fundraising and donor management software solution. A folder was created for each
graduate to store their contact information, their current position, their year of graduation, and the
Alumni services events they had attended. Alumni registered for those events via the school’s
website, and there was no integration between those events and Raiser’s Edge. A part-time
employee was thus tasked with entering the data from event registrations into Raiser’s Edge. This
data was supplemented with business cards collected during the events.

HEC Montréal Foundation

The HEC Montréal Foundation was created to “engage donors and raise funds to support the
School’s initiatives” […] and to contribute “to the development of the next generation of world-
class business professionals who will play an active role in cultivating social and economic
prosperity in Quebec and in further strengthening the province’s visibility and reputation
worldwide.” 1 Funds were collected from three main sources: organizations, alumni, and current
students, who contributed $10 per semester as part of their tuition fee. The Foundation had a strong
reputation for integrity and, in 2014, it earned certification in governance and good management
practices for charitable organizations from the Bureau de normalisation du Québec, Quebec’s
central body for standardization and certification.

Most funds collected by the Foundation were allocated to one of three types of projects: research
and teaching, student bursaries, and a special fund dedicated to maintaining the school’s physical
infrastructure, including buildings, classrooms, and equipment. The Foundation employed fifteen
full-time employees to manage personal donations, corporate donations, and telemarketing
operations to engage with prospective donors. When an individual or an organization committed
to donating money to the Foundation, their contact information was also stored in Raiser’s Edge.
Telemarketing operations required an additional piece of software to manage call operations.
Donations could be made using credit cards over the phone or online, as well as through a secure
website. 2 The Foundation periodically organized events to thank donors for their gifts and explain
how their donations contributed to the school.

1 https://www.hec.ca/en/foundation/about-us/index.html
2 https://don.hec.ca/dons_en_ligne/dons_en_ligne.jsp?lang=en

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Beyond the traditional student lifecycle

Although standard education programs accounted for the lion’s share of the school’s operations,
students also engaged with HEC Montréal in other important ways. These included special education
programs as well as EDUlib, the school’s online learning platform.

Special education programs at HEC Montréal

Although most programs offered by the school were governed by Quebec’s funding policy, HEC
Montréal also offered private programs that were not subject to this policy. This gave the school more
freedom with regard to the number and structure of special programs as well as tuition fees. In 2013,
HEC Montréal offered two such programs.

The Executive MBA

The Executive MBA (EMBA) targeted executives looking to acquire specialized skill sets in a
dedicated environment fostering both learning and networking opportunities with fellow students.
The EMBA program was highly exclusive, and each cohort had at most fifty students. For these
reasons, the EMBA program relied heavily on a personalized approach to communications between
the school and those students. For example, EMBA applications were not shared with the rest of the
school. Rather, they were evaluated by a small committee composed of staff working in the EMBA
office. Similarly, contact information and other student-related data were maintained exclusively by
the EMBA staff and were not shared with the rest of the school.

For the previous ten years, the EMBA program had relied primarily on its staff’s interpersonal skills
to build and maintain relationships with professionals. They were the ones who often convinced
executives of the benefits of pursuing an EMBA. For Michel Filion, EMBA’s recruitment director,
this personalized approach fit with the program’s exclusivity, although it meant that recruitment costs
could be higher than for other programs. This situation was not without risks, moreover, since it relied
heavily on the work of a few individuals. Information related to the recruitment process for the
EMBA program was managed primarily by a single person who used their own information storage
tools, including an address book on their phone. For the EMBA staff, this was one way they sought
to maintain control over their data and ensure the trust placed in HEC Montréal by executives was
not violated. Indeed, the staff worried that having this information centralized and potentially shared
with other services could betray that trust if busy executives were contacted for non-vital reasons, for
example.

Executive education

The other type of private program offered by HEC Montréal was executive education. The Executive
education office offered a variety of programs geared toward professionals. These included training
sessions that could last anywhere from half a day to several days and that focused on acquiring
knowledge on a specific topic (e.g., artificial intelligence). Executive education was also offered as
a customized product where the school designed a training program to meet the needs of a specific
organization. In the early 2010s, the Executive education office was the only unit at HEC Montréal
using a customer relationship management (CRM) system tailored to its needs. This solution was
perceived as very limited in terms of features and accessibility, however, in spite of its relatively

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narrow scope. At that time, the office was also undergoing a series of significant changes, including
the revamping of its branding, a name change, and the retirement of several key employees.

Online learning with EDUlib

Launched in 2012, EDUlib was HEC Montréal’s response to the growing popularity of MOOC
platforms such as Coursera and edX. It aimed to be the first to offer a large selection of courses in
French to meet the demand in European and Northern African countries, for example. In 2014, a
partnership was created between Université de Montréal, Polytechnique Montréal, and HEC
Montréal. In just a few short years, EDUlib grew to offer about thirty courses at six Canadian
institutions. For HEC Montréal, EDUlib contributed to two important objectives. First, it increased
the school’s outreach in parts of the world where it would otherwise be absent. Second, it offered a
way to showcase the quality of the school’s programs to prospective students.

Given the multitude of services and employees involved in ongoing interactions with prospective,
current, and past students, HEC Montréal’s ability to build a complete profile from the time students
first made inquiries to the time they graduated was limited. Every service had access to certain pieces
of the puzzle and had a partial view of a student’s lifecycle, but there was no way to compile that
data to create a comprehensive profile.

Building long-term relationships with students

As mentioned above, competition in the higher education sector had become increasingly fierce.
Gathering information about students had become critical and could impact significant decisions.
Getting to know candidates before the school even accepted them could help it “lock in” students
before they were snatched up by competitors. Likewise, information collected from students taking
online courses with EDUlib could help the school promote targeted programs more likely to lead to
applications to HEC Montréal.

Although HEC Montréal was able to manage student records through its enterprise resource planning
(ERP) systems, operations related to the ability to build and maintain strong relationships with
prospective, current, and graduate students proved challenging. The school could not paint a
comprehensive picture of students from the moment they showed interest in HEC Montréal to the
moment they graduated. The data required to build this picture was either missing or scattered across
the school’s various services based on their interactions with students. Preliminary inquiries to
department heads by prospective graduate students were typically made via email. While a
convenient form of communication, this made it difficult to evaluate the total number of candidates
who had shown interest in studying at HEC Montréal compared to the number who actually ended
up applying for graduate programs.

As information was deemed to be the key to addressing the challenges faced by HEC Montréal, a
task force was struck in 2009 to evaluate the feasibility and potential benefits of acquiring a customer
relationship management (CRM) system. Once fully implemented, this system would consolidate
data about prospective, current, and past students, enabling services to gain a comprehensive
understanding of students and provide what is known as a “360-degree customer view.” For
HEC Montréal, this would mean getting a clearer picture of who applied to the school’s various

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From Students to Alumni: Implementing CRM to Build Lifelong Relationships at HEC Montréal – Part A

programs, their needs, and who was interested in applying but eventually went elsewhere. Gathering
this data would also help the school to improve its website by including information that prospective
students are unable to find there, forcing them to call the school – especially Recruiting services and
the Office of the Registrar. From an operational standpoint, this would mean optimizing processes
and reducing the need for staff to answer common questions from prospective students. A
comprehensive Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) could be added to the website.

Although the CRM project was seen as important by the school, it was not approved until 2013.
Before then, the school’s IT Governance committee, which met every trimester to decide which IT
projects to greenlight, could not commit to such a major project impacting key student-facing
services. Budgetary cuts by the provincial government had forced the school’s IT department to re-
prioritize its projects and limited it to three per year. With its ambitious goal of consolidating data
across services, the CRM project was initially perceived as too risky since its anticipated benefits
were difficult to quantify. As a result, the project was constantly postponed in favour of smaller
projects aiming to optimize business processes.

In 2012, Lemay, who had been a regular user of CRM in his previous job outside the higher education
sector, began looking into acquiring a CRM system for Recruiting services.
PeopleSoft is a good records system. But what I need, for the student recruitment process, is a system of
engagement. We need to be able to gather and analyze information so that our recruiting tactics can be
targeted for optimal effectiveness. For example, I cannot send my staff to all the education fairs across
the world to recruit prospective MBAs. How do I know which fairs are more lucrative in terms of actual
applications, rather than those where we see some interest but which translate into few applications at
HEC Montréal? (Michel Lemay, head of Recruiting services)

For Lemay, the key to ensuring that HEC Montréal remained a top business school was to build and
maintain long-term relationships with prospective and current students. If successful, this could lead
to their choosing HEC Montréal for their ongoing educational needs, either at the school or via
EDUlib. It would also facilitate the work of Alumni services and the Foundation when they
periodically canvassed alumni for donations. Observing that the project had been stalled for years
and that some services were starting to grow impatient to the point of thinking about launching the
project on their own, the IT department took advantage of a reprieve in budgetary cuts to commit to
the implementation of a CRM system at HEC Montréal. Richard Lacombe, the school’s director of
information technologies, asked his staff to meet with representatives from the school’s services to
do a preliminary assessment of their business processes and CRM needs. This initial step aimed to
gain a deeper understanding of the scope of the student lifecycle at HEC Montréal so the project
could begin on a firm foundation. Pierre-Yves Tremblay, a business process analyst, and An-Phong
Do, an IT project manager, were put in charge of this preliminary assessment.

Onward and upward

For Michel Lemay, Richard Lacombe, Pierre-Yves Tremblay, An-Phong Do, and several other HEC
Montréal employees, the official approval of the CRM project was an important milestone. Although
it marked the beginning of what promised to be a lengthy initiative that would occupy a significant
portion of their time, all were convinced that CRM was key to creating and maintaining personal,
long-term relationships with students.
2019-12-06

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Exhibit 1
Case timeline

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Exhibit 2
HEC Montréal Facts and Figures (official brochure)1, 2

page 1 of 5

1 Source (Web archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20140114110959/http://www.hec.ca/en/governance_departments/facts_and_figures/FactsFigures_EN_2013-

14_final_WEB.pdf
2 Updated statistics are available from the HEC Montréal website: https://www.hec.ca/en/about/facts-and-figures/index.html

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page 2 of 5

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page 3 of 5

© HEC Montréal 13
This document is authorized for use only by Ashish Kudingila in HEC Montreal Part A - Implementing CRM taught by Peter Pleckaitis, Seneca College from Jan 2022 to Jul 2022.
 For the exclusive use of A. Kudingila, 2022.

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From Students to Alumni: Implementing CRM to Build Lifelong Relationships at HEC Montréal – Part A

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© HEC Montréal

This document is authorized for use only by Ashish Kudingila in HEC Montreal Part A - Implementing CRM taught by Peter Pleckaitis, Seneca College from Jan 2022 to Jul 2022.
 For the exclusive use of A. Kudingila, 2022.

page 5 of 5
From Students to Alumni: Implementing CRM to Build Lifelong Relationships at HEC Montréal – Part A

15
© HEC Montréal

This document is authorized for use only by Ashish Kudingila in HEC Montreal Part A - Implementing CRM taught by Peter Pleckaitis, Seneca College from Jan 2022 to Jul 2022.