Griffith University takes control of its student recruitment

Griffith University has deployed Salesforce’s Agentforce Education cloud in its contact centre, marketing communications and “advancement” departments, to improve the way students and prospects engage and interact with the institution.

Director of CRM and experience Christopher Dell.

Chief digital officer Sandie Matthews told the Agentforce World Tour Sydney that students expected consistent engagement experiences, which she characterised as “know me, respond to me and make it easy to engage”.

“When you have small friction it becomes a big issue very quickly,” Matthews said.

“When you have lots of multiple systems, if they’re disconnected, the experience becomes disjointed and challenging to navigate.”

Director of CRM and experience Christopher Dell said the way the university had engaged with prospective students was “fractured”.

While it had the elements of a martech stack - including customer relationship management (CRM), customer data platform (CDP) and marketing automation tools - they did not “work in tandem” and instead existed as “competing siblings”.

“None of these systems were bad - they just didn’t necessarily talk to each other in the way that they should,” Dell said.

“Really disconnected systems don’t just hide your data, they kill your momentum and ability to move forward. 

“[When] student recruitment is scattered, the team spends a lot of time stitching data as opposed to having conversations with students or prospects about their experience.

“The result of course is lagging insights, redundant outreach potentially and a fractured experience. You are not having meaningful conversations [with prospective students] and driving conversion.”

Director of marketing technology Leanne Towerzey said that having an integrated martech stack “plays an important part in bringing the journey of our respective and current students through their time with Griffith University”.

“We’ve got a number of systems and it’s how we get those systems to work together to actually progress the student through the pipeline [that is important],” she said.

“But [we have to] remember that a student’s journey isn’t linear. They often come to the website, they might call the contact centre, go back to the website, come to an event, and it’s really important that we align all of these platforms to give that holistic experience to the student. 

“The integration doesn’t create the value: the alignment of the platforms does - and it’s not necessarily the alignment of the technology, it’s alignment of the intent of the students, so how do we bring all of this together first and foremost with the student in our mind?

“The real work is the orchestration around the students and that needs to be informed by everything they’ve done with us before.

“Especially when there’s a human touch moment in there, that should then dictate and shape what happens to them afterwards.”

Contact centre insourcing

Until April last year, Griffith University “used an outsourced student recruitment model” and contact centre, which it has since insourced.

“[Two] of the big drivers were owning the experience end-to-end [and] improving the visibility of our pipeline,” Dell said.

“While we had some visibility over our pipeline, it was probably patchy at best until we brought back in the front-end of our student recruitment and started to plug that into the ‘brain’ that is [Salesforce].”

Insourcing the contact centre and centrally capturing all interactions that a prospective student had with the university, was seen as important to growing revenue.

Dell said that “deciding to go to university and the opportunity that brings” is “possibly one of the most important moments in a person’s life.”

“Getting help quickly or getting lost in that process can be the difference between them actually applying or walking away,” he said.

With the changes it has made so far, Griffith University can now “see the whole pipeline” around student recruitment, “not just isolated moments in that pipeline.”

The Salesforce platform is what Dell describes as a “minimum viable product” with “bare bones” functionality.

“We are live, but we’re learning,” he said.

“We’ve consolidated our channels in - nothing fancy at the moment, it’s phone, email, webform and chat as well, but really that was about us consolidating that and getting that all into our CRM system so we could then start to use that data.

“It was about trying to get the basics done properly.”

Data in Salesforce is already being used to drive improvements in student recruitment processes.

“One of the biggest lessons for us was around the rich data that we get,” Dell said.

“Every interaction that we have is an opportunity for us to learn more about our prospects. Where there’s friction in that pipeline,  it gives us an opportunity to ultimately improve our processes, not just in the contact centre but in the university more broadly.

“There’s now quarterly voice-of-customer reports going up to the VC’s [vice-chancellor’s] office from the future student team.

“We’re connecting executives to the actual problems that our prospects are facing and where there’s friction in the pipeline, which is helping improve our product and our process as well.”

Dell said that the university ultimately wants to have a single student record, comprising a “360 degree view” of the student or prospect and all interactions they have with the institution.

“It’s maybe not 360 [degree] at the moment but that’s certainly the goal, regardless of how and when they engage.”

Agentic engagement

With the Salesforce platform it has deployed, including Agentforce, the vendor’s agentic AI software, the university is examining how AI might further augment digital experiences and engagement.

Dell gave the example of a student attending a recruitment event and providing some contact details as well as a brief description of the domain of study they are interested in, and what they want to do with those skills at graduation.

“They’re wanting to find a course that aligns with those career outcomes,” he said.

Dell envisioned a bot being able to “work away in the background to organise a [campus] tour for the student”, and putting them “in touch with a recruitment advisor, and the agent making that appointment for them.”

Dell said that the university views AI technology as a support, not replacement, for its recruitment team.

“We can do a lot with the agentic frontend to wayfind, but it’s still really important for us at some point that they still make that human connection, and that’s the balance that we’re trying to find,” Dell said.

Ry Crozier attended Agentforce World Tour Sydney as a guest of Salesforce.