Arizona State University

For today’s higher education institutions, delivering a top-notch experience to constituents across their lifecycle is no longer optional.

At the beginning of the Arizona State University’s Salesforce journey, the university was challenged to boost retention, elevate graduation rates, and improve overall student success.

Surveys revealed that students were frustrated trying to access service and having to visit multiple siloed help desks to get help. For staff, managing a lot of inquiries in different places was inefficient and with minimal visibility into constituents, it was difficult to understand and address students’ needs.

The university set out to launch a broad initiative that would streamline and centralize services within the Experience Center. It then turned to Salesforce to build a central knowledge repository and a data-driven system for managing cases efficiently and effectively.

Using Service Cloud, ASU was able to connect over 100 departments and business units within its custom-designed knowledge base and case management solution.

It enabled users anywhere in the enterprise to create, manage, and track cases through ASU’s Experience Center. The heightened visibility into its constituents’ needs enabled staff to speak to students in context and provide seamless service.

“With Salesforce, we gained the ability for everyone to be on the same platform and share information so that we can make students really feel at home in this large ecosystem that we have at ASU,” said Gigi Speaks, Director of Information Technology at ASU.

Using Experience Cloud, ASU integrated its student-facing online interface (My ASU) with Salesforce to give students self-serve access to the knowledge base as well as access to university services. Students can easily find answers to their questions, create, and view cases and get direct assistance via chatbot or live chat. All My ASU interactions are tracked within Salesforce and advisors, coaches and other professional staff maintain a comprehensive view of each student and their entire case history.

ASU also designed a custom Advisor Portal that lets advisory staff leverage automation, predictive analytics, and case management tools to proactively identify, monitor, and reach out to students to address issues.

Bringing everything under one roof and creating partnerships across the university, the service team built ASU Student Profile 360 of its learners and was able to personalize and enhance the service they provide.

“We’re in a much more innovative place than before and in a place where we can be more proactive than reactive,” said Jason Wiley, the Experience Center’s Operations Manager. “It’s put us in a place to be more solid and dependable to each other and in terms of the service we provide our constituents.”

More than 16,000,000 cases have been resolved since ASU first implemented Service Cloud and more than 1,000 knowledge articles are currently available.

Using chatbot tools, the Experience Center hosted over 20,000 sessions and successfully handled 52% of the sessions using solely the chatbot. And users have responded positively to the ease of use and 24/7 functionality.

For staff, Salesforce has helped reduce the steps involved with managing cases and pulling in all the relevant data they need to assist students. With recent developments leveraging automation, predictive analytics, and Visualforce, the Experience Center continues to add efficiencies, minimize time spent on manual tasks and improve its responsiveness to students’ needs.

“With VisualForce, we’ve been able to create a custom interface where a person can call in and we can see their previous cases, what questions they’ve asked, what they needed and really dig into understanding their needs while they’re still talking,” said Speaks.

“That customer delight comes through personalization and relevancy,” said Frank Montoya, Senior Product Owner/Manager Enterprise Salesforce at ASU. “It’s very important when you’re working with constituents in any organization and Salesforce, as a CRM solution, can help you do that.”

Topping the U.S. News & World Report’s list of “most innovative schools” for consecutive years, ASU exemplifies a new prototype for the American public research university. With four campuses in the Phoenix area, an online learning program, and an expanding global presence, the number of ASU’s constituents has been growing at an exponential rate. ASU, however, remains committed to its charter — measuring itself by those it includes rather than excludes; and how they succeed — and continues to devote its energy towards the design of a uniquely adaptive and transdisciplinary university committed to producing master learners