Before the University of Oklahoma’s Price College of Business (“OU Price”) adopted BusinessCAS two years ago, “our application was not the most user friendly, and the user experience was not great,” said Erin Wolfe, Senior Director of the Center for Graduate Student Success.

In addition to offering a poor user experience for applicants and staff, the old system at OU Price didn’t notify admissions that students were in the pipeline until they submitted an application.

“We were kind of blind,” Wolfe said. “We’d be surprised, which is not great from a recruiting perspective. Your most in-demand leads are the people who are most engaged, and we had no idea who was engaged.”

As a result, one of the institution’s biggest drivers for moving to BusinessCAS was the ability to get deeper insights into who is in its pipeline. That, in turn, would allow OU Price to develop more effective outreach campaigns designed to get prospective applicants further down the funnel.

“We chose BusinessCAS because it gave us the ability to see who was completing applications and it gave us the ability to reach out to them to answer questions and get them much further ahead in the process,” Wolfe said. “It also gives us data at the end of the recruitment cycle to see where are losing applicants. Then we can determine whether there is something that we can do to make the process smoother.”

Wolfe also liked the fact that BusinessCAS allows students to apply to multiple programs with just one set of application materials.

“BusinessCAS lets students choose the right programs for them,” she said. “I like the ability of students to look at multiple programs and choose the best for them without having to do a ton of research on hundreds of MBA programs out there.”

Wolfe also said that by eliminating much of the paperwork and administrative burdens historically associated with application processing, BusinessCAS allows admissions staff to spend more time engaging with students.

“We’re using that time wisely to help reinforce our efforts in that area,” she said.

Those results weren’t achieved in isolation. OU Price worked closely with other departments on campus to implement BusinessCAS, most notably the institution’s Graduate College and IT department. With help from Liaison, the implementation went well.

“It’s not easy to do something like that at a university,” Wolfe said. “Not because people don’t want to do it, but because it’s a huge institution with a lot of legacy systems everyone is tied to. I was really pleased and thankful that we were able to do it in just a few months.

“The team at Liaison was great,” she said. “Before working with the MBA program, I worked on strategic planning for the University and I was responsible for various technology implementation projects. I’ve worked with a lot of software developers and I work with a lot of implementation teams. I thought the Liaison team was very responsive. They did what they said they were going to do and we stuck close to the timeline.”

The result is a better recruitment and admissions process at OU Price.

“BusinessCAS gives you more control over your students’ user experience and it gives you more control over your engagement with prospective students, from your homepage on BusinessCAS all the way through the application. That then allows you to make better decisions about how to recruit students, how to move them through the pipeline and how to better serve them before they actually click the submit button. Most universities just don’t have that.”