Blog
April 25, 2022
Transform your institution’s student experience by streamlining their engagement process
Education’s toughest critics
Let’s face it, students can sometimes be harsh critics when it comes to the technology in their academic environment. You may have heard some of the following complaints around your campus:
- Why doesn’t this work?
- Can’t you put everything in one place?
- Why is it so hard to find what I need?
- This is lame! The 90’s called and want their system back!
- Why can’t I just book an appointment from my phone with my advisor?
Keeping technology updated is a problem that many schools have yet to address. And even those who have done it well face challenges to meet the growing demands of their students who are used to the modern, mobile technologies available to them.
Providing student support after matriculation
Until recently, getting students in-the-door has been the priority with post-matriculation support and retention taking a back seat. But how do you ensure student success in a variety of measures? What keeps them on track for graduation with the degree of their choice?
Administrators are looking for answers to these questions, but many have come up empty… until now. Salesforce has provided no-code, cloud-based constituent engagement solutions across multiple industries for over 20 years. Recently, it has tackled the educational space with vigor offering solutions like the Education Data Architecture and Admissions Connect. These are certainly exciting developments in the Salesforce ecosystem, but the solution that primarily addresses the “after matriculation” question for students is the Student Success Hub (SSH).
Salesforce’s Student Success Hub enables student-centric functionality for:
- Students to locate their Success Team members (a group of advisors assigned to them)
- Students to schedule an appointment with an Advisor or other Success Team member
- Advisors receive alerts of issues or potential problems facing students (early warning)
- Providing students with a clear set of actions or tasks to maintain academic success through Success Plans
- A pathway tool that allows students to design a plan for their academic program (i.e., degree planning)
- A mobile responsive ‘community’ that allows the student to find answers quickly (knowledge articles), make appointments with an advisor, chat with an agent or ‘bot,’ and submit a case or ticket for an issue that needs more attention
Attain Partners can help you hit the ground running with our Advising Essentials Package for SSH
To solve this problem in K-12 and Higher Ed, Attain Partners has developed an Advising Essentials package for Student Success Hub with pre-configured templates, recommended plug-ins, and prescriptive options. This package, when implemented, will move your school into the future of a connected campus. Using Salesforce as the backbone of the technology stack, your teams can move quickly toward solving students’ problems and addressing their needs quickly, allowing your staff to work more effectively and efficiently. Salesforce’s data model can provide your school with a 360-degree view of the student – in other words, all interactions with a student are captured so that advisors and staff know the student’s story and don’t have to start from scratch with every interaction.
When you combine SSH with additional functionality that can be delivered on the same platform from Recruiting and Admissions to One Stop to Communications, you have a more consistent experience for students and more data for improved services and targeted communications.
One source of information for students
One integral part of the Student Success Hub is the student portal, where students can access a single place for answers, connections to advisors, and important tasks for completion. A Success Team can be built for each student, where all the support staff associated with the student’s success can be easily found and appointments can be made directly with a team or an individual advisor. Success Plans can also be delivered individually to a student to highlight a task or group of tasks that are important to complete in their academic journey.
In an increasingly digital world, the expectations have been raised for our students that they will have a seamless, consistent, and mobile-friendly experience throughout their education experience. Many schools are behind in meeting these expectations, but are eager to take on this challenge yet don’t know where to start. Another ‘point’ solution to solve for recruiting or admissions or learning management sometimes leads to further frustration for students when those solutions are not connected. A start with Attain Partner’s Advising Essential package built on the Salesforce ‘platform’ is one way to begin this journey to a connected campus.
See SSH in Action
The University of Baltimore (UBalt) enlisted Attain Partners to implement Student Success Hub (formerly Salesforce’s Advisor Link) and reimagine student services for the institution. This digital transformation dramatically increased engagement between UBalt academic advisers and students by 1) facilitating easy communications between students and advisers; and 2) allowing advisers to spend less time on manual processes and more time interacting with students. Read the full case study here.
Attain Partners – Salesforce Experts
No matter if your organization is beginning its Salesforce journey or 10+ years into development, we are here to help you achieve your goals. To learn more, check out our Salesforce innovation services and read case studies about our work. Contact Attain Partners today to learn how we can help you achieve your goals by harnessing the power of Salesforce. Explore blog posts from Attain Partners’ Salesforce team.
About the Author
Maury Davis is a Senior Salesforce Specialist at Attain Partners. Maury has worked in higher education and nonprofit organizations for over 15 years, focusing his last 10 years on demonstrating the value of the Salesforce Platform to his employers and clients.
