Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Modernizing CRMs for Student Success
Just like on-campus students, remote learners expect a quality student experience from their higher ed institution. Providing a quality experience coincides with modernizing and simplifying virtual services, yet the work toward this can not be done until institutions understand what problems they are solving. In this episode, Katelyn Ilkani talks with Darcy Van Patten, Chief Technology Officer at the University of Arizona. Darcy shares her perspective and expertise on how the University of Arizona plans to use CRM and user research to solve the problem.
He llo. And welcome back to this month's episode of Tambellini's Top of Mind podcast. We're here to discuss the complexity of simplifying and modernizing student support services, whether or not students opt to take courses in person online, or a little bit of both this coming fall. Most institutions are hard at work in their quest to modernize their virtual campus services, to improve the student experience coming to this school is a lot easier than delivering on it. However, and behind the scenes years of planning, internal consensus building and coordination must happen before institutions can actually begin to deliver on this promise of streamlined services. Today, we're going to be speaking with Da rcy Van Pa tten University of Arizona's chief technology officer. She is going to share her perspective and expertise on Arizona's efforts to implement and expand adoption and functionality of an enterprise wide CRM solution to address this problem. Welcome to the show, Darcy.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Katelyn. I'm coming to you today from beautiful Sonoita, Arizona. It's about an hour outside of Tucson, a beautiful wine country. It's a sunny day, so it's nice to be here. I love talking about the work. It's exciting to help transform the student experience and just happy to talk with you, Katelyn.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for coming on Darcy. I'm really looking forward to hearing how you have tackled this at Arizona, what the problem was, what it's taken to get to a wonderful, robust solution. And with that, can you tell us how, how did you get to deciding that you needed an enterprise-wide CRM to streamline and improve the student user experience? What got you here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting. I've been at the university about three and a half years, and as I was just joining the university and starting to meet some of the executive leadership that I'd be working with, you know, one of the first conversations I had with our vice provost for student success at the time, um, really led to him saying two things, which is, you know, we need a CRM system and we need a student portal. And as I often do, I try to backtrack away from talking about technology and into talking about what are the, what are the problems we're trying to solve? And so I think I started to say something like, well, you know, what's leading, you think that we need those things and what are the problems that we have today. But that conversation was really quite critical. And then, thankfully, and luckily enough, about three months later, I was able to get involved in the very large scale, strategic planning effort. And as I started to talk again with my leaders and my partners, they had some really important ideas in their proposals related to technology. And I asked how do you feel about me, cherry picking your ideas and building off of them. And I essentially, u h, proposed an effort thatI called Personal DigitalU, which was all around a high quality, personalized, digital experience for our students. U m, and really that's how the CRM was born. A lot of the components of that had to do, you know, not with the transactional things like registration and financial aid. And of course those things all have to be there, but it's about the, the human interactions, right? The advisor, u h, meetings and interactions about the interactions with students, u h, with their peers through clubs and communities and, you know, all of those connections that students make. So that was really the beginning. And, uh, you know, I having worked on CRM before and, and known knowing that many times those efforts fail, I pulled together, all the things that I knew we would need, you know, you need to focus on user experience and you need to focus on data quality and you need to focus on training and adoption and getting buy-in of your partners. And so I included all of that in the proposal, you know, a little bit with the attitude of like, well, you know, if we can't do it right, then we shouldn't do it. And lo and behold, it got funded and it really became a flagship effort out of the strategic plan that was like three years ago now. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, and you've touched on something pretty interesting, this idea of first you define the end to goal, which is what is the ideal student user experience. So how did you come to that vision?
Speaker 2:Uh, well, you know, when I arrived at the university where, you know, where people saw school as are a lot of large institutions and the particular version of PeopleSoft that we are on has a user experience from about 1998. And I will say things like, you know, I'm sure in 1998, this was a magnificent experience, but the expectations have changed dramatically since 1998. And our students really expect a high quality consumer, uh, like, uh, experience. And so, I mean, really just looking at all of the, uh, technologies that they were using, the lack of integration, uh, what that experience is like, and then realizing that as we've become a global university, uh, with a large online program, many students never experienced the beauty of our campus. And so their experience that they have with us is their digital experience. And the quality of that experience really sets the, for the university as a whole. Um, all that said, though, we've done a tremendous amount of user research with students directly, uh, first-year student journey mapping, uh, we've done empathy mapping where students really talked about what was that moment in time when you knew that the University of Arizona was the right place for you? And what did that feel like? Um, so we've done a huge amount of work directly with students. Um, we've done design studios with them where they're thinking and helping us understand kind of how they mentally think about things and what type of experience they expect. Um, and really just turn that into a pretty comprehensive, uh, you know, overall vision for that, what their experience might be. And then we continue to work with them as we're developing, uh, our designs with user experience designers, doing usability studies, focus groups. I mean, students are just a core part of how we, how we develop that over time.
Speaker 1:I think the point you just made is so important that it's really impossible to design the ideal student experience without the focus being on the student and having their voice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And it was, you know, the first year a student journey mapping workshop, which we did, I did host three years ago, almost exactly it was in August, I believe. Um, that was really telling because, you know, we, we really, we really work with students as if every department is the only department that a student's interacting with. Right. And we heard loud and clear from them that they want to work with us as the University of Arizona. They don't think about, you know, oh, this is the bursar's office and this is the registrar's office. And this is the tutoring center. They just think about as a young adult learner right now, what is it that I need to accomplish today? And how do I navigate the complexity of this huge university? Um, it's not, we don't make it easy for them at all. And the way that we partitioned in silo, you know, how we think about the university is not at all, how students think about it. Um, and you know, we, we involved all of our partners in that. So, you know, we had the registrar's office in the room. We had advisors in the room, we had instructors in the room because as important as it is to inform the design work that we're doing, it also needs to inform behavioral change and cultural change, um, by developing shared empathy, really for what the student's experiences like.
Speaker 1:And you mentioned that this has been a three year project and the beginning was really the planning and the strategizing. So once you got through that design work, Darcy, what was the next step for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we actually kicked off a two and a half, roughly two and a half years ago. It was January 7th, 2018 led years. This, um, yeah, so it was January 7th. Think it was 2008 pain. Yeah. Is when we kicked off. And there were roughly eight University of Arizona employees and 1200 partners that I had gotten quickly to come on onto campus. And we really started kicking into gear planning right then. So, I mean, we are, we are an agile shop and, and I have been successful in getting our executive sponsors and others to understand that I'm not going to give you a three-year roadmap, any three-year roadmap that I developed today will absolutely be wrong. I guarantee it and especially come COVID right. I mean, anything we had planned to do completely got turned upside down with COVID. And so from the very beginning, I've said, this is not like implementing a student information system where once you can register students and you can disperse financial aid and you can get bills paid, you know, roughly you're done. Right. I mean, that's not all of it. I mean, we don't know what the finish line is here. There probably realistically is not a finish line, you know? And so from the beginning, I really stuck to that. Um, and it's, it's worked well because it's allowed us to be flexible. It allowed us when COVID hit to, you know, finish the two week sprint, we were on put that code into production. So we've just delivered the value that we worked on and switch gears completely. You know, we needed to switch gears and develop a change of schedule for them that would help students, um, adjust their schedules very late in the semester to stay on track academically. Um, we pivoted my marketing cloud team to become the internal agency for executive leadership because they weren't able to get really critical communications out. And we were able to do that because of the agile way that we work. You know, we weren't putting six months of work on the shelf.
Speaker 1:And so it sounds like you, you, you chose Salesforce for this initiative. Had you already had Salesforce in place at the university before you started this larger enterprise wide project?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, you know, like many, uh, like many universities, there were small, maybe 10 different kind of instances of Salesforce that had been purchased and stood up and really small units, um, in standalone mode. So we had small, small pockets of use of Salesforce. Um, you know, certainly I was familiar with Salesforce. I also worked at Oracle, so it was familiar with Oracle sales cloud. Um, actually worked on a recruiting managed package when I worked at Oracle. And then when I was at the university of Washington, we implemented, um, Ellucian recruiter, which is a managed package that's built on top of dynamics, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. So I was, I was, you know, familiar with the market. Um, you know, what Salesforce really, really has going for it is the community. It's an amazing community of adopters. Um, you work with higher education, so you know how we are, we share information, right? We love to talk to one another. We love to share best practices. We, you know, have a very open, you know, intellectually open community by, by design right academically. Um, and there's just such an amazing community of adopters that I was able to learn from, uh, early on and, and really helped me shape the business case, but the budget, you know, an understanding of like, okay, what are all the potential pitfalls? What do you wish you had planned for early that you didn't? Um, so the community of adopters is really, is really, uh, what, uh, makes Salesforce stand out for me. Um, as well as kind of the ecosystem of additional vendor products that, you know, plug and play fairly seamlessly because it's the strategic investment for them, right. To play well with Salesforce.
Speaker 1:So you had to take these separate instances and make it into an enterprise wide solution. What did that look like? What kind of resources did that take?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So back to developing that early proposal, you know, I understood obviously, you know, you're going to need a Salesforce team, right? You're going to need Salesforce admins. You're a need developers, but it's so much more than that because you also have this, this, this kind of, all of these other platforms and systems that you need to integrate with. So, you know, the team overall, when we started, um, you know, of course the Salesforce stack development team and admin team, um, and integration team, as well as investment in an integration platform, um, a data strategy and quality team, small team, but a team, um, training and adoption, right. Adoption is really the most critical thing I think with enterprise CRM, because it's not like a payroll system, you don't have to use it, you know, like payroll, if you don't enter your time, if you don't, you know, use the HR system, you don't get paid, right. There's not no adoption risk there. Right. But with enterprise CRM, nobody's, you know, telling people you have to use it. And so that adoption piece and making sure that you're, you're really kind of building the right thing that people need and that they're going to want to use is also really critical. I think the actual first role that I brought on was a marketing and communications professional, so that we could start to tell the story of the work that we were going to do together and the value that it was going to bring, you know, stand up a website, start interacting with people. Um, so I think that was the first, very first role that I hired onto the team, um, user experience. I mean, we're talking about digital, you know, student services and simplifying student services. Um, did user experience was also really, really key to bring onto the team. We've actually shifted the team over time. So, you know, I would say that the first year was really all about creating these core capabilities. So thinking of a CRM system, and this includes marketing cloud for us, you've got this powerful service platform of case management, and we have, you know, kind of a multi-channel, uh, intake mechanism, you know, telephone to case integrating to Amazon connect, uh, live chat to case, uh, web form, email text. These are all channels by which our students service organizations and our advisors and others are interacting with students. Um, and then coming into that case management and kind of that work to a workload management, so really important capabilities adding into that appointment management, um, and then thinking about engagement. So events, campaigns, how you involve students in like, uh, leadership groups or mentorship groups, um, and an email marketing obviously also really important. So that first year was all about these kinds of core plug and play capabilities, um, that then any given unit at the university. So think tutoring, or think diversity and inclusion office, um, can adopt based on what their needs are about a year and a half in the scale's really started to tip from building things to, um, having people adopt and use things, right? So we actually restructured the team, um, to include what I consider kind of the product team. They're putting those new capabilities out, new feature enhancements, you know, we're just starting on corporate relations as an example. And then the, what I consider an internal professional services team that is really consulting with individual units about, okay, what do you do? How do you serve students? And which of these core capabilities do you most need to accomplish your work? So that's a lot of words.
Speaker 1:It's great. And it, it sounds like as you went from, you know, building to focusing on adoption, you've also focused on solution areas that people can choose on campus to adopt. Can you tell us about those, how you thought about and structured these solution areas?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I called them core capabilities, solution areas, I think either, either works, but really like, you know, what are those reusable, repeatable things that, that people do, you know, I meet with students that's through appointments. I, I answer questions for them. Okay. How do they want to ask that? Is that virtual is that telephone is that, you know, maybe in the fall, uh, this year walking into the lobby of our admin building and actually getting face-to-face health events, right. Obviously events happen all across campus. Um, and we had no central events management systems. So just think hundreds and hundreds of event brights, trying to patch those together with constant contacts and spreadsheets, and, you know, all of these things that people were doing to try to really support these activities. And you just see those repeat patterns right. Of, of behavior and interactions. And then that's, that's what tells you, okay, we need a core capability here. Um, appointment management was a good example. Um, you know, our advisors obviously scheduling time to meet with students, um, and needing a solid solution, uh, to support that need, uh, is where we started with appointment management. But, you know, thankfully we built in zoom integration from day one. Not many people used it, but tell you what, March, 2020, uh, the, the data talk, right. We went from almost entirely in-person advising appointments to almost entirely zoom appointments, uh, within a matter of a week. Right. And, and that's where having that in place already was so critical. If we hadn't had that in place, we would have been scrambling really to make that adjustment. So yeah, it's that repeated patterns of interaction. And then what are kind of the core architectures that can be scaled across the university? So you're not building a, uh, super bespoke solution just for one department, um, really trying to solve what I call horizontal problems, uh, which means that they're shared and that they really run across the university.
Speaker 1:So what are some of those, those critical areas that you identified that do run across the university? Can you talk about some of those, some of those modules that you've built?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. Um, the appointment management module is a really large investment for us. Um, we did develop a custom, uh, module there for academic advising because we had pretty advanced requirements and Salesforce advisor link was still, uh, in it's pretty, you know, pretty early days and didn't have what we needed at the time. So appointment management was, was a big one. Um, that's both, you know, kind of, uh, prescheduled appointments as well as drop-in appointments. Um, with appointment management comes, other things like lobby check-in and, uh, you know, managing a key, um, that's as an example, as well as advisor notes. Um, so that's, that's one example I mentioned earlier, the multichannel, uh, service desk capability. So, you know, examples of that might be, uh, office of scholarship and financial aid, you know, prior to coming on to trellis, which is our internal brand for our Salesforce program, um, office of scholarship and financial aid was using four different systems to try to piece together the service that they provide to students. They had, you know, a telephony call center solution. They had a custom built lobby management and kind of to get, you know, like you, you, you go to the department of motor vehicles and you pull that tag, right. They call it okay, number 43, your time is up right. Maybe two and a half hours later or whatever. Um, but they had that be accustomed system. They had another, uh, back office, like, um, ticket tracking, like case management system. I forget what the fourth, I think, a different, uh, live chat. So that's an example. They had four different piece together, um, solutions that they were trying to use to provide really good service to students. You know, of course last year with fall, fall disbursement happens, you know, right before the semester. And we were all 100% virtual, you know, normally the administrative building lobby would be full of students waiting to get support. And now all of this is happening in an integrated way with zoom and, you know, Salesforce and, you know, the other solutions that, that, that, you know, that they're using. So that's another example, um, events management, I mentioned, um, at one point I think it was 2019, maybe it was 20, 20 the years I tell you it last year was like a blur year. I know, right. Time takes forever. And at the same time, it's gone in a minute. Um, anyway, we, we did a survey with over 400 people responding event coordinators across campus. And, you know, everyone was just trying to piece together, um, small solutions. And of course with paid events, you've got PCI compliance and you've got this additional risk and a need to really support that in a unified way. So events management, is it another example we actually ended up, uh, we did an RFP and we selected Blackthorn as our vendor partner Blackburn is built directly on the Salesforce platform, um, and stood that up pretty, really quickly actually within probably six weeks, uh, hosted our first virtual event, which was optical sciences, graduate orientation. Um, and, and, you know, the way we work is we try to stand up as small a thing as possible. Like what is the smallest minimum viable product that we can put out there with real people using it, and then have them really, you know, tell us where it needs to grow, break it, where it makes sense, you know, help us expand the product. It's very essentially, you know, not just the erratically. And that's been a really important part of the way that we work is involving our end user groups really, really early, as early as possible, um, and evolving what we do based on their feedback. So events is another one, uh, mass marketing, you know, email marketing is another one. Uh, we actually do have Salesforce is social studio platform, which is for social media management and also social listening, um, that was released quite early. Um, texting as a service is coming out right now. Um, uh, what am I missing? Yeah. I mean, what's wonderful about that. When you have this suite of core capabilities, then you start to look at other audiences, like we're just now starting to partner with, um, our research innovation and impact organization and our government, as well as some colleges around corporate, you know, an external partner relationships and so much of those core capabilities and how we interact with others, whether they're our students or whether they're our external partners, it's a combination of, of many of those same capabilities. And so, you know, you really get to get the maximum value. I think when you think about it in this kind of architectural way,
Speaker 1:Darcy, a lot of the things you're speaking about touches on change management and the ability to manage and meet expectations of your constituents, get people on board, how have you handled change management? This is a beast of a project you've embarked on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it, it is. And, um, you know, like I said, it's not a payroll system, you don't have to use it. Um, you know, we're a large, uh, highly distributed university from a decision-making standpoint. And so there's very few times when there will be, you know, authoritarian statements of bow shalt use this system, right? And so it really is trying to understand the problems that people are trying to solve for their own individual units. And what can you bring to the table to help them, right? I mean, you ha you have to have high value. You have to offer high value or that, or they're not going to want to use your product now, thankfully, this is funded by the university. And so, you know, one value proposition we have is that it's free to you, right? You're not going to have to buy a new product, or, or maybe you're already paying a vendor, you know, 15,$20,000 to use a product and we can provide you the same capabilities, uh, and free up some of your money for something else. You know, we've had a tough financial year as has every university and where people can save money, uh, locally on their, on their budgets. That's, that's really attractive. Um, I'd say we also really, uh, tried to help sell the value proposition of being in a shared platform. You know, back to that student journey, the complexity of a student, having to interact with hundreds of different departments on hundreds of standalone systems, all that behave differently that looked different that may or may not have their data accurately in the system. It's very frustrating. And so, you know, you sell it through the student experience lens and you also sell it through, you know, their ability to ha to understand how the student is interacting with the university. Like, all right, I'm meeting with the student as an advisor. And I see that they've, you know, been, been in the financial aid office and repeatedly, or that they're working with a registrar right now on some late change petition or something. It helps me provide better advising service, because I know more about what the student is, is kind of doing and, and what types of interactions they're having. So those are some of the selling points. I mean, you know, there's always going to be some units that want to do their own thing. They want to stay in their own system because, you know, they, they love it. You know, they're comfortable with it. They love it. They think it differentiates, differentiates them as a college or as a unit. And that's fine. You know, I, I try to, you know, I try to pick the wins, right. Pick the wins, and also just know that I'm mean eventually, right. Eventually we're going to continue to offer more capabilities and value. We're going to continue to build the integrated student experience that we are working on right now. Um, and actually using the Salesforce experience platform for that. Um, and over time, it's going to be a disadvantage for them to be in their own standalone system because they won't be integrated. Right. Um, and over time, students will be like, why do you have me over here in this separate system when all of my other worlds is here. Right. And the trial is integrated portal. So over time, you know, they'll come and, you know, it's nice. I mean, right now demand is
Speaker 1:That's smart. I think that's really smart. You know, you're saying, Hey, where are you going to just offer a really big value? And there's grassroots adoption instead of this bottom down, you have to have this approach.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. You know, and right now, I mean, we have more demand than we can come serve quite frankly. And that's why I mentioned that we reorganized the team into this kind of professional consulting services where we can really good at onboarding people. And it's not a make vendor. I mean, you're, you you've mentioned before the call, you're going to a big, uh, big consulting organization. Right. And it's not unlike that where, you know, it really is meeting with an organization and like, what is the work that you do to serve students and what are the problems that you're trying to solve for? And here's the set this, this tool bag of, of core capabilities, which of these are most important for you and how do we onboard you incrementally in a way that doesn't bring your organization to a grinding halt, because it's just too much too fast. Right. So, you know, I think the theme is like immigrated data, very open permission sets, um, set of core capabilities that can be mixed and matched for any given department based on what they're trying to achieve. And then really, you know, that consultative approach to bringing people in
Speaker 1:Darcy. Thank you so much for sharing all of your lessons learned and the approach that you've taken to the enterprise CRM project at the university of Arizona, it's really, really great work. And I think that you have the right mindset. That's why you have so much requests for adoption, you know, exceeding the ability for your team to deliver, because it's really taken this approach of a service to the constituents. And sounds like it's been a huge success.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's still, you know, in the making, right. We have so much work still ahead of us. I mean, it's, it's amazing to think of how much we've accomplished and, and really, you know, as with many things technology wise, the pandemic really did accelerate, uh, people's willingness to adopt new technology because, you know, it was an absolute necessity, but I mean, there's so much still ahead of us. And, um, yeah, I mean, I'm excited, you know, it's always fun to solve problems and to give people new solutions that make their daily work easier. We know we're making the student experience better all the time. Um, and that's just, you know, that's exciting.
Speaker 1:Thank you for being on the show with us today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you for inviting me. It's really been great.
Speaker 1:That concludes this month's episode of Tambellini's Top of Mind Podcast. Don't forget to check out our other episodes, blogs, and member-only resources at thetambellinigroup.com.