Empowered by connected consumer technologies, today’s students are growing up in a world of instant gratification and unprecedented choices. And their expectations are changing all the time.
Whether they’re interacting with their favourite brand online, or looking for the best education institutions, they expect the same intelligent, connected experiences. And that includes how they engage with your institution, from the moment they first connect with your admission department, until they join your alumni network. How can you deliver the experiences, the skills and opportunities your students expect throughout the entire student lifecycle and beyond when those expectations are being redefined daily?
For many business schools, delivering such experiences is already a challenge. And adding on top of that the decline of applications in MBA programmes, the increased competition from free online business education or the ever-changing workforce skills requirements mean you can quickly lose your edge without a solid and agile infrastructure to scale.
As you’ll discover in our new E-Book, many business schools are actively seeking transformational solutions to respond to this radical shift. How? By breaking down their data silos and embarking on a journey to become a truly digitally connected campus. They believe digital transformation is essential to deliver on student expectations and to address the imperatives of the market.
The benefits of digital transformation
Beyond digital transformation is this idea of becoming a Connected Campus, which is to build a single, consistent data foundation, where everyone can access all of the information they need to understand, serve and even safeguard students as effectively as possible.
By breaking down data silos and using the right platform to create a consistent, connected campus experience, today’s higher education trailblazers gain:
Visibility: A 360-degree view of the student experience, as well as organisational transparency for greater control over campus performance, engagement and services.
Flexibility: A highly configurable platform which enables flexible systems integration, agile innovation and seamless, cross-channel services for students, faculty staff and alumni.
Scalability: Empowered by a smart, connected cloud platform, business schools can better serve the needs of their students, staff, alumni and donors at scale.
The Outcomes – Three Big Wins Across the Student Lifecycle
1. Reach, Engage, and Enroll the Right Students
As a connected campus, you can empower your recruitment and admissions teams with a complete view of the student lifecycle, including all the information they need to generate more leads, personalise engagement, and turn candidate data – including your campus visitors – into actionable insights to drive applications.
For Saïd Business School, the use of multiple CRM systems across sales, marketing and onboarding led to fragmented communications, frustrated applicants and a less than seamless recruitment process. Things needed to change – fast.
In 2017, the institution begun its digital transformation journey with Salesforce to build a single, integrated student platform. Since deployment, the school has used its newly enabled 360-degree student view to personalise messaging in exciting new ways, targeting prospective students more directly, and increasing interest in the institution.
2. Deliver Outstanding Student Experience and Boost Student Success
Your future candidates are smart, connected and always-on, but they’re also anxious and socially concerned. And much like today’s consumers, they expect their school to deliver fast, proactive and personalised support – both on campus and off.
As a connected campus, you can deliver proactive support for at-risk students, personalise messaging for every student, and optimise resources for staff to deliver the intelligent and compassionate support your pupils expect.
IESE Business School has a rich archive of student data, but for too long, its data remained hidden away from other departments in fragmented, siloed systems. After working with Salesforce.org to break down those siloes, every department across IESE can now easily understand what the others are doing, enabling better collaboration, a higher standard of communication and better student experiences across the board.
3. Build Lifelong Alumni & Donor Relationships
With a 360-degree view of your alumni, everyone in your institution is empowered to make good on the career and networking opportunities your students expect when they graduate. Plus, with a rich source of contextualised data, you can better strategise and tailor your alumni campaigns to help build networks that last, and fundraise to secure the future of your institution.
Hult International Business School has been disrupting the academic landscape since day one. As advocates of lifelong learning, the school is dedicated to building the most powerful network of students and alumni worldwide. As its key differentiator, remaining engaged with these graduates is vital.
Since migrating its wealth of student and alumni data to Salesforce, Hult is now able to access all its student information on-demand and identify trends at a glance. With easier access to this huge volume of data, Hult has been able to drive deeper, more personal relationships with its 21,000 alumni, and turn those relationships into better results for current students.
To learn more about how leading business schools are connecting their campuses for the future, download our Business School Trailblazers E-Book
By Salesforce.org | December 12, 2018 | Business School, Education Cloud, Higher Education
