Online and blended education provider Ivy College is one of Australia’s most recent education success stories. Ranked by BRW as the fourth most innovative company of 2015 and named Australia’s top medium-sized business for service excellence by the Customer Service Institute of Australia, Ivy is leading the way with its innovative customer-centric approach to online learning.

Since launching in 2009, Ivy has experienced unprecedented growth – it now has thousands of students studying nationally recognised diploma-level courses, and just under 100 staff employed in its Sydney office.

From the outset, Ivy has partnered with Salesforce to deliver this success.

The entire business has been built around meeting the unique needs of busy adult learners. With no set semesters, timetables or deadlines, you can enroll online for a course at any time, study online from wherever you are and study at your own pace.

Using various parts of the Salesforce platform – including Pardot, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud – Ivy has created a single source of truth from lead generation through to sales and student support. What’s more, the platform integrates with Ivy’s learning management system and student management system, creating a single point of data entry and saving hours of administration time.

To illustrate the ingrained role that Salesforce plays in Ivy’s daily operations, Roger Burgess, Executive Director of Operations, describes a typical customer journey.

“If someone is interested in studying beauty therapy, they can download a course guide from our website. From there we can send course specific or industry information tailored to the student’s need via Pardot. Personalisation is at the heart of everything that we do at Ivy and these tools enable us to provide that outstanding tailored experience from the outset.

“Then, one of the Ivy team can confidently follow up with a phone call to answer any further questions that may help that prospective student make an informed decision.

“Once they enroll with Ivy, Service Cloud becomes the single view of the student. For example, they may have a few questions about an upcoming assessment, so they book a call with a Study Coach using our online scheduling solution. Before the call, the Study Coach can view all relevant information in terms of activities completed, assessments submitted and units completed,” said Burgess.

Using Service Cloud, the average case resolution for student issues is two hours from case open to case closed, which is a fantastic result for the students. “The service we provide has been put into the hands of the customer – we continually ask for feedback and adapt our service model to improve the customer experience. This is why we have a customer Net Promotor Score of 62.75, which is equal to the best customer service companies around the world.”

Salesforce is proving invaluable for Ivy staff. As well as putting all customer information at all staff members’ fingertips, Ivy is using Work.com to manage skills across the organisation and recognise great performance. It is also used to set goals and objectives aligned with the overarching business strategy.

Indeed, all eyes are on Ivy with the recent announcement that it has merged with the Australian Institute of Management. “The sky’s the limit in terms of where to from here. Salesforce is there to support our customers and the Ivy team every step of the way,” Burgess said.