The New Model for Digital Transformation in Higher Education
Legacy Thought Processes
In years past, if a Higher Education institution wanted to move the needle through technology, it seemed like there was only one path: “Upgrade Banner (or other SIS and/or ERP systems).” After all, just about every workflow of critical importance runs in Banner. This upgrade would enable whatever new capabilities Ellucian (or other vendor) had delivered in its ERP and SIS systems, giving the institution access to new capabilities with which to innovate on behalf of its constituents.
However, ERP and SIS migrations are costly, and more importantly, all Universities must ask themselves this question: are these back office systems the right tools for the job to meet the expectations of today’s students and other key constituents?
Shifting Expectations
Much like the expectations of customers in the business world, the expectations of today’s applicant and student have shifted dramatically in the past decade and were accelerated even further starting with 2020’s COVID pandemic. According to the Third Edition of Salesforce’s Connected Student Report, which interviewed over 2600 students and staff to surface key insights, only about ⅓ of students rated their university experiences as “great”, signaling the need for close examination of the student experience at a broad level.
Some of the key trends identified were as follows:
- Onboarding Experience: Students connected during orientation were 35 times more likely to rate their experience positively. Only 2% with poor onboarding rated their experience as great.
- Connection and Belonging: Students value connection, especially through in-person activities. Building a sense of community at orientation sets a foundation for their entire academic journey.
- Online/Hybrid Models: Post-pandemic, students now expect flexible learning that combines in-person and virtual options, adapting to changing academic needs and modern preferences.
- Mobile and App-Based Learning: Mobile access is essential; students with higher ratings often had access to mobile-friendly services, easy-to-use platforms, and essential digital tools.
- Unified Systems: Students prefer a one-stop platform; multiple apps and systems create frustration as they navigate different platforms for campus-related activities and services.
- Career Services: Students expect early, accessible career support; they value career services that are clear, easy to navigate, and available throughout their academic journey.
- Mental Health and Wellbeing: Over a third of students requested increased mental health support services, underscoring the growing importance of comprehensive well-being resources.
- Tailored and Personalized Support: Students seek personalized support; universities with robust, accessible services report higher satisfaction levels among their student populations.
- Lifelong Learning: Universities are evolving alumni engagement by offering lifelong learning and career services post-graduation, building strong, ongoing connections.
These types of expectations have more in common with a B2C business looking to increase its e-commerce conversion rates, boost CSAT scores, and create lifelong customers than they do with student expectations from a mere 10 years ago.
Given this paradigm shift, the role of technology within universities has shifted rapidly, and the requirements of platforms and system architecture to deliver on these expectations has changed dramatically.
The Role of Technology in Universities
Since technology plays such a key role in the way the modern student interfaces with the university, selecting the right set of platforms to deliver on student expectations for their overall experiences is of paramount importance. This trend is not unique to universities–we’ve seen it materialize across just about every type of vertical business segment as customer expectations have changed over the last decade, and it’s now reached higher education as well.
The situation in higher education is screaming for a system of engagement that enables the institution to address not just a few scenarios, but the entire student experience, all on a single unified platform. This platform must be flexible enough to fit the exact needs of the constituents–especially applicants and students–and it should address these needs through rapid deployment of functionality that is easy to maintain and enhance, because universities don’t have the IT budgets of a tech company and must build something they can maintain.
Much like we saw in Industry, yesterday’s siloed back office legacy ERPs are not good fits for this situation. And upgrading them is oftentimes a proposition that is well into the 8-figures in investment over a minimum of a 24-month timespan.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel–Look to Other Industries
Engaging critical personas, like a customer, is nothing new in the world of customer engagement software.
For years, businesses have been adding software that focuses on enhancing the customer experience to better optimize how they interact with customers. In a typical business, the customer experience is dictated mainly by a combination of two things:
- Employees who represent the brand, mainly sales and customer service
- Customer-facing technology that allows self-service interactions, like an e-comm site or a chatbot
The buying experience is expected to be congruent with what a prospect sees in whatever marketing or advertisement led them to interact with the brand in the first place.
Solving this challenge required companies to limit interactions with complex back-office systems like ERPs with poor user experiences to back office users and gain a much greater level of control over what matters for their customer experiences through flexible front office systems of user engagement.
Here are a few examples from Green Irony’s customers to highlights these concepts:
- Spirit Airlines suffered from complex, highly-siloed systems that were difficult to interact with as a whole, very similar to some of the complaints in Higher Ed. We worked with them to use MuleSoft to make these systems cohesive and enable them to roll out CX enhancements like chatbots.
- UPC Insurance wanted to have much finer-grained control over their risk scores and their customer experience. We worked with them to build a layer of APIs using MuleSoft so that they could have a tailored quoting experience while also controlling which services were used to assess policy risk. These were the two most important things to their business.
- Finally, a transportation and logistics company’s custom legacy technology–basically its own custom CRM/ERP combination–imposed severe limitations on its ability to serve its customers up to their expectations. They chose MuleSoft to allow Salesforce to integrate with this legacy ERP and delivered a migration strategy that transitioned workflows onto the Salesforce platform over time to deliver the experiences necessary to serve their customers.
In all of these cases, an integration platform, like best-of-breed MuleSoft, was used to “unlock” legacy ERP systems and enable them to be used with more modern customer-facing Software… like best-of-breed Salesforce.
Applying to Higher Education
Higher Education is a few years behind where businesses were, and it can learn a lot from their approach to solving these challenges.
Stakeholders are demanding a much better digital experience. For higher ed, three of these key stakeholders are applicants, students, and alumni. Legacy systems like Banner were not built for these demanding expectations, and upgrading these systems is incredibly costly and doesn’t move the needle enough.
As seen above, the Salesforce and MuleSoft platforms have been solving these problems in other industries for over a decade and have enabled smart businesses to be more competitive by knowing their customers and delivering to their needs better. Salesforce delivers the experience and MuleSoft enables that experience to work in lockstep with existing legacy systems. A great migration strategy then allows you to move critical workflows to the Salesforce platform over time, maximizing your investment in the technology and allowing you to deliver stakeholder experiences that meet the complex needs of today’s applicant, student, and alumni.
In a nutshell, MuleSoft “wraps” your older technologies like Banner to enable them to work in a modern way while Salesforce Education Cloud delivers experiences for all important stakeholders.
What Do You Think?
We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and feedback. These topics are way too broad to get into everything in a single blog, and if there’s something specific you’re wondering about, let’s talk.
Maybe you want more detail on why an ERP upgrade can’t solve these problems, you’re curious about how long a solution like this would take to get live, or you’d like more details on what a Salesforce + MuleSoft implementation and workflow migration strategy looks like for Higher Education.