Ivy League Biz School Enhances UX and Operations Using Salesforce Sales Cloud

Client overview

The client is a leading US-based Ivy League business school. It has consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world, and it offers full-time MBA, doctoral, and many other executive education programs. The school also has a publishing arm that publishes business books, leadership articles, and case studies.

Client Business Challenges

The business school lacked a cohesive CRM strategy, implementation, and governance mechanism. It had disparate CRM systems and tools with multiple versions of student data. Each department had its own databases and tools for collecting and managing key student interactions, which made it difficult to share student information between departments. The use of offline tools was also rampant throughout the school, which led to unstructured, uncorrelated, and unusable data formats.

The overall objective of the program was to build a school-wide Salesforce CRM foundation, with the following goals:

• Streamline and automate the CRM process to provide a 360-degree view of student data.
• Share enhanced data across the school in an automated manner while adhering to data privacy standards.
• Adopt a standard platform with supporting tools and technologies to increase internal efficiencies and productivity.
• Foster collaboration within and between the business school departments, peer groups, and constituents.
• Create a consistent and seamless constituent experience by providing a mobile-first experience and access to intuitive reports and dashboards.

Solution highlights

LTM built a single school-wide Salesforce organization by leveraging higher education data architecture (HEDA) with the following design considerations:

• Secure and Reliable: Preapproved by the school’s security and compliance team along with auditing capabilities.
• Granular Control: Fields level control for all roles and access management with simple configurations.
• Automated Feed Process: Report creation with near real-time data. • Collaboration and Multitenancy: Compliance reports for data usage; Consolidated Interaction Logs.
• Internal and Federal Compliance: Adherence to compliance requirements and student contact preferences.
• Trusted and Best version of Data: Salesforce subscribes to data from master data management (MDM).
• Business process automation for each department.
• Custom solution for events, RSVP, and survey management.

Technology Landscape

• Salesforce platform capabilities including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud.
• Leveraged MBOLTTM, an LTM tool, for CI/CD deployment process.
• Migration from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience.
• Informatica MDM and ETL.

Client benefits

• Created Student 360-degree data view with intuitive and transparent reporting and a seamless user experience by using Salesforce Lightning.
• Reduced manual intervention by automating data processing and distribution between departments.
• Fostered collaboration within the school’s departments, the groups and constituents.
• Improved data quality through better data management and governance mechanisms.