How the Salesforce Connector is helping UNC Charlotte get the most out of their tech stack
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) has powered their continuing education division with Destiny One since 2009. The Student Lifecycle Management (SLM) system helps them deliver the customer experience their learners expect while supporting operational effectiveness and efficiency.
To help strengthen the experience they deliver to students across the lifecycle—including the prospect stage—UNCC added the Salesforce Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) to their tech stack. But to get the most value from their CRM, they leveraged the Destiny One Salesforce Connector powered by SnapLogic®. This connector provides bidirectional real-time integration between Destiny One and the CRM, so UNCC staff have the data they need to deliver personalized, high-quality engagements to all learners regardless of stage.
The Best of Both Worlds: Leveraging an SLM and a CRM
Modern colleges and universities have to operate like businesses to meet the expectations of their customer bases and grow. Geography alone will no longer drive sustainable enrollment growth. Competition in today’s postsecondary market is global, which means it’s essential to understand and exceed the needs of learners to attract and retain them.
As such, it’s critical to have the right tools at your disposal to serve learners at every stage of the lifecycle. Leading colleges and universities already leverage the Destiny One Student Lifecycle Management (SLM) system to optimize checkout experiences, improve conversions and serve students once they’re enrolled.
To make sure you’re meeting the needs and expectations of learners, it’s wise to add a customer relationship management (CRM) solution in your tech stack as well. And to get the most out of your CRM, it’s essential to integrate it with your system of record.
To support this integration, Destiny Solutions® developed a suite of CRM Connectors. At UNC Charlotte, they chose Salesforce as their CRM and leveraged the Destiny One Salesforce Connector. The Salesforce Connector, powered by SnapLogic ensures that any updates campus staff make in Salesforce will appear in Destiny One, and vice versa.
“By using both Destiny One and Salesforce, we can tap into both applications strengths and gain a full view of the learner’s process,” said Jasmine Bishop, a CRM Analyst in UNCC’s OneIT Office. “When the department was using Destiny One alone, we were able to assist students who enrolled in a course or program easily for transactional matters, however staff was limited when it came to documenting additional touchpoints, such as advising and technical support.
With a deep integration between Destiny One and Salesforce, UNCC has gained a number of benefits:
1. Consistent Prospect Engagement
2. Improved Marketing Performance
3. Maximized Effectiveness and Flexibility
1. Consistent Prospect Engagement
With Destiny One, staff have a single, unified view providing them rich data on every enrolled learner. By creating a single record for each learner, students receive a consistent customer experience without having to repeat themselves to different staff members across different engagements.
At UNCC, they wanted to extend that knowledgeable and seamless experience to prospects who hadn’t yet enrolled. They leverage their CRM to create records for learners before they register for the first time, and therefore gain the same functionality at the very beginning of the learner engagement cycle.
With the real-time engagement between Salesforce and Destiny One, staff can deliver personalized experience to learners at any stage of their lifecycle.
“Staff resorted to keeping separate spreadsheets, documents and emails to track the interest of prospective students, document conversations with current students and created various methods for setting personal follow up reminders,” she continued. “With Salesforce prospective and current student information can be viewed in a single application that all staff can access and contribute to, which has resulted, in a more collaborative work effort and knocking down the silos within the department. Now, the complete history of a student, no matter who that student interacted with and what they discussed is easily available. Students now receive more personalized and knowledgeable service from the department as a whole.”
With the real-time engagement between Salesforce and Destiny One, staff can deliver personalized experience to learners at any stage of their lifecycle. As a result, staff can provide knowledgeable advice to customers with faith in the quality of the data.
“Being able to share information between Salesforce and Destiny One is critical,” Bishop said. “Staff using Salesforce need to be able to access a student’s academic history from within the application, for example knowing if a student signed up for a specific course, if they dropped ones in the past and what their certificate status is can offer a number of insights. This information, empowers staff with the ability to provide a more personalized experience for the student and ensures the right questions are being asked in order to better understand and meet our learners needs.”
With the real-time engagement between Salesforce and Destiny One, staff can deliver personalized experience to learners at any stage of their lifecycle.
“Without the integration, work would be inefficient and ineffective as staff would have to input the same information into each system,” she continued. “Keeping track of what was entered into the Student Lifecycle Management system and what went into the Customer Relationship Management tool is not only tough to manage but frustrating. Information could be out of sync and therefore unreliable and possibility not usable.”
2. Improved Marketing Performance
The tight integration of Destiny One and Salesforce doesn’t just benefit staff serving students one-to-one. It also supports marketing teams in delivering high-quality, personalized campaigns and messaging designed around rich data.
Destiny One already supports marketers with a great deal of functionality designed to support ongoing engagement and conversions. With Destiny One, divisions can already position themselves as a hub for individuals’ continued education and create meaningful access to lifelong learning.
By adding Salesforce to the mix, and integrating it with Destiny One, UNCC gains powerful marketing automation capabilities and the capacity to knowledgably engage prospects as well.
“Students benefit at every stage along their educational journey when Salesforce and Destiny One are connected,” Bishop said. “In the past, marketing may have sent a specific message to a prospective student without knowing they had already been in contact with an Enrollment Specialist and are ready to sign up. In that instance, they may have been providing information catered to somebody at the beginning of an interest journey, when the individual was ready to make a enrollment decision.”
Marketers can deliver the right message at the right time to every prospect, based on their engagement history and even potential prior interactions with the institution.
“Having the ability to document what stage a prospective student is in allows communications to be tailored to what they really need,” Bishop said. “With the robust information gathered, staff are able to provide more tailored marketing and student success messaging. This includes the ability to suggest specific offerings that align with a student’s interests, rather than sending a generic list of courses.”
3. Maximized Effectiveness and Flexibility
With Salesforce and Destiny One working hand-in-hand, UNCC has been able to stay highly agile and responsive to fast-changing market conditions. Continuing education divisions have always had to be flexible to drive their success, but the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 forced a level of agility that was unprecedented.
At UNCC, they leveraged the flexibility of the Destiny One SLM to quickly convert a number of their face-to-face courses online. What’s more, with the automated workflows built into the SLM, students were immediately provisioned into Canvas and granted access to the resources they needed to continue their education remotely.
“The ability to adapt and be flexible is phenomenal with Destiny One,” Bishop said. “There’s no way we could have adapted to COVID-19 without a system that was so well-integrated into our LMS and other technical infrastructure.”
The integration helped simplify the communication between UNCC and their learners.
“With the Salesforce integration, we could quickly and efficiently make critical touchpoints with students,” she added.
UNCC’s staff and leadership were able to drive divisional transformation without getting obstructed by the rigid confines of any particular tool.
“Since this removed any major barriers for operational management of this transition, staff could focus their time and energy on ensuring online courses were built effectively, which is the true issue of going online that quickly,” Bishop said.
Leveraging Purpose-Built Software to Grow Your Business
Modern businesses need modern tools to achieve results. This is what today’s customers demand in every industry, and higher education is no different.
Today’s student is a highly discerning consumer who expects their experience with the institution to be engaging both inside and outside the learning environment.
Salesforce, without a tight integration with Destiny One, would ultimately be just a fancy Rolodex.
- Jasmine Bishop
At UNCC, they’re able to deliver on these expectations by leveraging the functionality and flexibility of the Destiny One SLM in concert with their Salesforce CRM. They can leverage the full power of both systems, rather than hoping that one system will deliver on every need independently.
“Salesforce, without a tight integration with Destiny One, would ultimately be just a fancy Rolodex. This set up wouldn’t allow Continuing Education to leverage the powerful automations and workflows that can be driven by data from Destiny One,” Bishop said.
“By working together, Destiny One and Salesforce offer high levels of agility and scalability for our Continuing Education department,” she continued. “Now with Salesforce in the tech stack, we’re shifting from a reactive model to a proactive model and are able to start planning long-term solutions.”
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