Education Company Increases Student Success Team Productivity by 45%

Educational technology leader deploys Groove across 75 custom Salesforce orgs to centralize operations and improve the quality and efficiency of admissions and student success teams

The Highlights

This publicly traded educational technology company contracts with non-profit colleges and universities to offer online degree programs from top universities around the world. The company supplies its client institutions with a technology platform, coursework design, and infrastructure support, including admissions counseling and online student services. In order to better focus on providing a world-class experience to their students, the company selected Groove to automate the hundreds of student interactions that its student success representatives had to manage each day. Since implementing Groove across 75 custom Salesforce instances, the company has streamlined operations and increased the productivity of its student success teams by 45%.

Big Wins

• 45% increase in productivity
• Seamless integration with 75+ Salesforce instances
• Faster and more reliable student follow-up
• Rapid roll-out and adoption across teams

The Full Story

This educational technology company’s mission is to bring high-quality higher education to users directly at their homes, wherever they want to be. It manages all of the administrative aspects of remote instruction for its university partners, from admissions and marketing to providing students with the services they need to be successful and complete their degrees.

“We do everything except teach the courses and make the decisions on who universities should accept as students,” said the Senior Director of Operations. “From getting students teed up through the application process all the way to providing the university with information for admissions decisions, we take everything out of the way for the students and universities so they can either learn or do their jobs more effectively.”

Coordinating Student Communications Hits a Breaking Point

Managing relationships with dozens of universities and thousands of students and faculty is no easy feat. Everyday, Admissions advisors recruit new students, while Student Success advisors guide students through their online higher learning programs and provide the same support that they would receive from an on campus experience, virtually.

Each Student Success advisor is responsible for managing more than two hundred students, so efficiency is key to delivering a world-class educational experience. Prior to implementing Groove, advisors were spending several hours each day writing manual emails for routine communications and reminders or researching student information in Salesforce in order to have more personalized, relevant communications. The company tried to use Salesforce’s mass emailing capability to send messages at scale, but it was too rigid and lacked important functionality.

“With Salesforce’s mass emailing tool, we couldn’t prioritize students based on their status or where they were in the program,” said the Senior Director of Operations. “We also couldn’t track who opened our emails and who didn’t – and if a student wanted us to use a personal email, we had no way to update it for these mass email sends.”

Further complicating matters, the company has a different Salesforce instance for each university that it works with to administer online higher education programs. Each university has its own custom workflows, coursework, lexicon, and requirements that need to be adhered to in order to provide the right student experience. This complex technology environment exposed key limitations of its online scheduling tool, which was essential for booking meetings with students. 

The Solution: A Salesforce-Native Sales Engagement Platform

The company began looking for a sales engagement platform that could be customized to support the Salesforce educational workflows of 75 different universities and meet the varying needs of its multiple advisor teams. These requirements quickly narrowed the field to the only sales engagement platform that is Salesforce native: Groove.

After going through demos with all the major sales engagement platforms, Groove was clearly the best fit for us. – Senior Director of Operations

“We really liked how it is a native engagement layer for Salesforce – and with over 75 custom instances, this dramatically simplified what was required to deploy and manage the platform.”

Groove’s native Salesforce integration had several key advantages. Groove automatically reads custom configurations and aligns with custom workflows, without the need to map fields or spend hours configuring Salesforce permissions. If it’s in Salesforce, it’s in Groove. This efficient architecture also ensures that all activities are captured in real-time, eliminating data latency and sync errors. This dramatically reduces administrative overhead and enables the company to manage Groove in one-tenth of the time that it would take to manage sales engagement platforms that operate as the system of record.

Ease-of-Use Drives Rapid Adoption Across Teams

Support for the company’s complex Salesforce requirements was key, but Groove’s ease-of-use was also a very important factor in its vendor selection process. The platform had to be intuitive enough for the student advisors and admissions counselors to use it every day.

“Groove’s ease-of-use on a daily basis is huge,” said the Senior Director of Operations. “With Groove, everything an advisor needs from Salesforce automatically comes up in their inbox. They don’t have to go through extra steps, because it’s already plugged into what they are doing. Before Groove, advisors would have to open another tab and log into Salesforce to see what’s going on with a student.”

With minimal training, the company is able to get new Admissions and Student Success advisors up and running on Groove in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

It was an extremely easy process to get hundreds of our advisors ramped-up.– Senior Director of Operations.

“Groove is so intuitive that after we shared out a quick training video to show what it does and then offered a couple of office hours for any questions, we were done. It took longer for us to create the video than it did for people to get trained on it – and the video didn’t take long.” 

Achieving New Levels of Productivity and Student Engagement 

Groove is streamlining the student engagement in two ways. First, for one-to-one communications, advisors have access to Salesforce data right in their Gmail and can easily access templates and insert online scheduler links as they compose their messages. 

“The templates and scheduled emails are my favorite part about Groove,” said an admissions advisor. “I am able to make templates that I can send to multiple students to help save me time throughout my day.”

Streamlining workflows and automating tasks are saving advisors several hours every week.

With Groove, our Student Success advisors are saving 15 to 20 minutes per email, which allows them to spend more time speaking with students on the phone. – Senior Director of Operations

Improving Student Engagement with Automated Message Flows

The second game changer has been Groove’s multi-step, multi-channel message Flows to automate routine, deadline-driven messages. 

“Groove Flows is taking us to a whole new level in our ability to interact with our students,” said the Senior Director of Operations. “Instead of sending mass emails to all students, Flows lets us prioritize students based on their status, where they are in their program, and even their preferred email address. These were all things we couldn’t do when emailing through Salesforce.”

Flows also play a critical role in replacing routine reminders that advisors were sending manually to alert students about important dates like deadlines for enrollment or class registrations. 

Prioritizing Follow Up with Engagement Data

Groove’s ability to provide advisors with engagement data on which students are opening and clicking on messages gives them the insights they need to prioritize feedback and ensure none of its students fall through the cracks.

“With Groove we can easily target phone calls based on dates and deadlines for responses, and we can target people who haven’t opened emails,” said the Senior Director of Operations. “Before it was very manual and time consuming.”

The Results

• 45% increase in productivity
• Faster and more reliable student follow-up
• Seamless integration with 60+ Salesforce instances
• Rapid roll-out and adoption across teams