Logistics

  • 4:00PM Eastern, Friday 16 June 2023
  • Rebecca Joffrey, Cornell University
  • Dana Miller, University of Texas - Arlington

Notes

Context

  • Rebecca is the inaugural Director of Digital Innovation & Strategy at Cornell.  Oversees campus-wide determination of how technology can be used in a coordinated way to advance the university's digital strategy.
  • The idea is to leverage technology to scale services, and there has been a gap where engagement technology should be: higher education has a lot of big applications like ERP and other infrastructure, but was missing the engagement layer.

Chapter 1

  • Engagement Ecosystem is the approach, based around a CRM ("secret sauce for digital transformation"), and CRM is core Digital Transformation with:
  • In the jobs-to-be-done framework there is a heap of communication and analysis and workflow and reporting needed and the question underneath all this is "what is the best technology to realize this particular job to be done?":
  • Look at building your 360-degree-view-of-a-customer over time, and do not think of that as a starting point.

Chapter 2

  • The effort and time required to get the most value from your core CRM platform is large and expensive, and rather than having your core CRM platform's benefits and applications be diffused across all manner of things to which it is not necessarily well suited, allow different domains to have their own solution stacks (e.g., Maximo for Finance, ServiceNow for IT, etc).
  • CRM at Cornell has a model of a student illustrated below, and this provides a complete-enough dashboard of a student's whole life (both inside and outside of the classroom, and being able to gauge student engagement with co-curricular activities), supplemented by the use of Perdot to understand click-through and engagement with this like emails.  The dashboard looks like this:
  • Importantly, students also need a 360-degree view of the university and all of the services and facilities that are available to them, such as being able to make appointments and see their calendars and upcoming tasks due:
  • "The path to modernization starts with making data more accessible across the information."
  • Rollout here started with advisement and with meeting management.
  • Data are pulled into Salesforce from PeopleSoft and Workday to support a lot of this activity.

Chapter 3

  • In many universities a traditional information-technology-delivery approach sees an "order one, get one" approach to fulfilling stakeholder and customer needs, and that approach tends to deliver a whole pile of different and disconnected applications that do not provide a consistent experience and which accumulate technical debt and risk at an alarming rate.
  • There remains a lot of confusion about who "IT" is building things for — stakeholders are not customers, and if we are building for our stakeholders then we are not building for our frontline teams, and if we are building for our frontline teams then we are not building for their customers, the "real" customers!
  • The other thing to be aware of here is that the frontline team are typically doing these three things most of the time: selling, service,  or marketing (and eventually we might see "commerce" appear in higher education too).  These problems are all completely solved already by the affordances and capabilities of CRM Platforms like Salesforce — we don't need to build or invent those things, because they already exist!
  • Using the platform allows a form of dynamic segmentation to identify students at risk and apply bulk actions to them (such as routing them to specific support services or making appointments for them, and also situations such as "Pell Grant recipients who have not yet met with their advisors", and actions can then be taken to nudge and get people to the place where they need to be.

Chapter 4

  • There are three primary options available to choose from when a business unit needs technology: do nothing, provide a stand-alone solution, or embrace within a platform solution, and each has its pros and cons:
  • Looking to move their Application to Study functionality from the Salesforce "app" to SurveyMonkey "Apply" = https://apply.surveymonkey.com/streamline-application-management-with-apply/

Chapter 5

  • Cornell's student-engagement landscape looks like this:
  • ...and the forward strategy looks like this:
  • The front door for a lot of this comes through the website at https://experience.cornell.edu/ which is linked into the back-end systems through the CRM, providing a rich application-pathway capability for Cornell that is effective and enjoyable for students (who also have access on a mobile app to see and manage their Cornell application and its status).  Opportunities like "research" and "global" are available through here, managed by program leaders across the campus:
  • At the back end is a Salesforce "application engine" that fields the incoming data payloads and routes the requests to the appropriate people for triage and assessment and outcomes-and-decisions can be sent as alerts both to staff needing to approve requests and applications and to students when decisions are made, and this is all nicely integrated:
  • Throughout the Salesforce platform there is the concept of the "capability stack" that has new data and activities striped across it, which build together and add value to the whole:
  • Integrates with Microsoft Bookings [https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/microsoft-365/business/scheduling-and-booking-app] for appointments (and for things like private study spaces).
  • Future?  Likely to be starting with some use of artificial intelligence in the domain of search to feed chatbots that will support students navigating financial aid questions.

Further Information

Presentation Slide Deck

  File Modified
PDF File 2023.6.16_Cornell CRM Playbook_IBAWG_SHARE.pdf Rebecca Joffrey Cornell CRM Playbook slide deck. Jun 20, 2023 by jeff kennedy (auckland.ac.nz)

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