Part one of a series of three posts.
Co Authored By Kirsten Schlau – Sercante & Dr. Bradley Beecher – Salesforce
Student expectations today are vastly different than they were a decade ago. Today’s students are looking for a personalized, seamless, engaging journey that keeps pace with their brand experiences outside of higher education. At the same time, more and more individuals are bypassing the traditional college education routes. As a result, HEIs need to exceed student expectations to reach enrollment and retention goals and ultimately deliver successful student outcomes.
To help combat these headwinds, there’s a tremendous untapped opportunity for HEIs to leverage their data. Yes, you’re probably reading this and thinking we do use data — we analyze our data to maximize the value of resources and stay ahead of constituent needs. We’ve been using data to create strategic plans, execute them efficiently, and analyze their results to differentiate our institution, proactively improve student outcomes as a whole, and report outcomes to government agencies and ranking organizations.
Oftentimes though, that data is trapped inside campus systems that don’t easily integrate with each other. It is time-consuming to piece together a cohesive and accurate story when the data is trapped. It is difficult to generate real-time institutional reporting, create a unified student record, take action from the data, and personalize the student experience to build a sense of belonging.
But, what if we told you there’s an opportunity more specifically to use that data on an individual basis, at a 1:1 scale to personalize the student experience in real-time? This is happening in other industries. In fact, you might have experienced such personalization as an online shopper.
Over the course of this three part blog series, you will learn about using your institutional data to create personalized student experiences at scale and in real-time within your college or university. This series will comprise:
Part one of this series will focus on Real-time Interaction Management and Real-time Interaction for Student Success.
Part two will provide an overview of Salesforce Data Cloud for Higher Education, potential use cases, and best practices for successfully using Data Cloud.
Part three will focus on building a unified data vision and then activating your data to build a CRM + AI + Data strategy for your institution.
What is Real-time Interaction Management?
Real-Time Interaction Management also known as RTIM, uses customer interactions, predictive modeling, and machine learning to deliver consistent, personalized customer experiences across channels in REAL-TIME.
“Forrester Research analyst Rob Brosman originated the term Real-Time Interaction Management in 2012, and three years later Rusty Warner, another Forrester analyst, offered the formal definition of, “Enterprise marketing technology that delivers contextually relevant experiences, value, and utility at the appropriate moment in the customer life cycle via preferred customer touchpoints.” Source
RTIM provides marketers the ability to gain immediate visibility into critical moments within the shopping or user experience, which in turn can deliver better consumer experiences and outcomes — relevant offers and product suggestions on the right device at the right time. These terrific experiences drive customer engagement, satisfaction, and in turn, revenue.
Impact of RTIM on Daily Interactions
As an everyday consumer, you’ve likely already experienced the effects of RTIM — or have experienced a scenario where you wish RTIM had been leveraged. Here’s an example scenario illustrating RTIM in e-commerce:
Let’s say a customer, Mary, visits an online fashion retailer’s website:
Browsing Products: Mary lands on the retailer’s homepage and starts browsing through summer dresses.
Real-Time Data Capture: As Mary navigates through the website, her behavior is captured in real-time. This includes the pages she visits, the products she clicks on, her past purchase history, demographic information, and any other relevant data.
Real-Time Analysis: The e-commerce platform analyzes Mary’s behavior and data in real time. It identifies her preferences based on her browsing history, past purchases, items in her shopping cart, and any other available data points.
Personalized Recommendations: Using RTIM, the e-commerce platform dynamically generates personalized recommendations for Mary. It might suggest summer dresses similar to the ones she’s viewing, based on her style preferences and past purchases. These recommendations are displayed prominently on the website in real time.
Real-Time Engagement: While Mary is still browsing, a pop-up notification appears offering her a limited-time discount on a dress she had previously shown interest in. This real-time engagement aims to incentivize Mary to make a purchase.
Adaptive Pricing: As Mary continues to browse, she adds a couple of dresses to her cart but hesitates to complete the purchase. In response, the e-commerce platform dynamically adjusts the prices of the items in her cart, offering her personalized discounts or free shipping to encourage her to proceed to checkout.
Abandoned Cart Recovery: If Mary leaves the website without completing her purchase, the e-commerce platform sends her a personalized email reminder within minutes, reminding her about the items in her cart and offering her an additional discount or incentive to complete the purchase.
Cross-Channel Consistency: Whether Mary interacts with the retailer’s website or mobile app, or when she receives an email, the messaging and recommendations remain consistent across all channels, ensuring a seamless and personalized shopping experience.
In this example, RTIM enables the e-commerce retailer to engage with Mary in real time, providing her with personalized recommendations, discounts, and reminders tailored to her preferences and behavior, ultimately increasing the likelihood of conversion and enhancing customer satisfaction.
Additionally, some online retailers are now using RTIM not only in their marketing efforts but also as a way to offer better customer experience.
In the ecommerce example above a lot of the experiences were grounded in segmentation and of course made up of data.
And it’s no different for HEIs- the ability to segment and provide greater personalized content and experiences leads to a great student experience.
Read further to hear how others in higher education are doing this today.
Real-time Interaction for Student Success
Imagine a world where student advisors can gain a full 360° picture of their students in a single view — from past class enrollment and performance, required courses that support their designated degree path, intelligence to recommend courses based upon individual interest, and passions outside of their degree path and automatic insights into things such as on target to graduate, at risk, potential for drop out and whatever other insights that might be unique to your Institution.
Oh! And one more thing to add: this is all done at scale with minimal manual effort put on the advisor.
This vision can become a reality when your data is not trapped in siloed campus systems. You might say, how is this possible? Here’s how:
All of this data aggregation and insights are powered by Salesforce Data Cloud and Einstein 1 Platform, so advisors can spend time and focus on having meaningful conversations with their advisees.
Einstein can offload or address the most common, basic, or foundational questions students have so that an advisor’s interaction with the students in their caseload focuses on deeper and more meaningful advising interactions. A unified student profile, aggregating student data into a single student record will also allow advisors to meet with as many students as possible and encourage those meaningful conversations. This requires a ton of manual effort in the current state and requires a lot of additional time, which let’s face it — advisors don’t have.
With Data Cloud, advisors can provide more proactive and holistic support for students because campus data about that student is unified in a single record, a benefit to both students and the institution. In turn, students can make more informed and thoughtful decisions with this proper support from academic advisors — helping students understand how to navigate the university/major policies and procedures better and more importantly offer an exceptional college experience. Ultimately, Data Cloud will help build a better staff experience with a unified student record and a better student experience, meeting the expectations of today’s students.
In the next post in this series we will provide an overview of Data Cloud for Higher Education, examples for potential use cases, and best practices for using Data Cloud.
Ready to Transform Your Student Experience?Discover how real-time interaction management can elevate the way you engage with students. Enhance their experiences with personalized, timely interactions that make a difference. Learn more about Salesforce Education Cloud and how Sercante can help transform your institution.
Original article: Combating Higher Ed Headwinds with Data
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