Fulbright University scales a world-class student experience in Vietnam with Salesforce

Ha Nguyen, Director of Information Technology at Fulbright University, says the new campus will approximately triple the university’s current capacity to 1,500 students. Filling that capacity will require strong recruitment and admissions efforts — assisted by the university’s ongoing digital transformation. 

“We are trying to provide equal opportunities for people all over the country on a need-based financial aid model,” says Nguyen. “Our Admissions team travels to many schools in faraway provinces across the country, and conducts many activities in-person and online through different platforms year-round. These student recruitment efforts generate a lot of leads, all of which have also been recorded, tracked and nurtured thanks to Salesforce.”

The Admissions team follows up on each lead, and assists prospective students with their university admissions application and their financial aid application.

“The majority of our applicants apply for financial aid, so most students must complete two application processes,” Nguyen explains. “These processes used to be managed manually by the admissions team. In each cycle, they deal with hundreds of questions from applicants, and manage countless document uploads. 

“The manual method was possible when we recruited 50 to 100 students in the first two years, but it’s not possible anymore with our continuous expansion.” 

Once the university admission and financial aid applications are successfully completed, each student record is handed over to the Student Life team. In the first years of the university, Nguyen says this handover was also processed manually. 

“Again, that is no longer possible with more than 750  students currently enrolled at Fulbright (all cohorts combined). Manually transferring student records from the Admissions team to the Student Life team also creates opportunities for human error, and raises data security concerns. Protecting the personal data of our students is an important priority for Fulbright.”

Finally, the Student Life team needed a better way to communicate with students during their university experience and manage a growing number of service case requests as the student base expands.

Nguyen and his team knew that digital transformation was the way forward. So they turned to Salesforce to create a platform capable of scaling with the university. 

“We want to manage the whole student lifecycle on Salesforce,” he says. “We now use Sales Cloud to manage outreach, admissions and financial aid applications in a single pipeline.”

This allows the Admissions team to monitor the application process, answer questions, and proactively identify when a student may be having trouble completing an application. 

“For example, the Admissions team can identify if an applicant has not finished the application, and use Chatter to reach out to them to see if they need help,” says Nguyen. “It all happens within Sales Cloud, which means we can communicate more effectively with applicants.

“We’ve also built a student portal and knowledge base — called One Stop — on Experience Cloud,” he adds. “It provides students with a one-stop shop for university services. They can search the knowledge base for university policies, and create service case requests for the Student Life team.”

Nguyen says Fulbright is also using Salesforce Shield to encrypt student data, and create needs-based access to further enhance data security. He explains that application screening is often outsourced, and Salesforce enables his team to restrict access to students’ personal and contact data where it is not required to complete  the application assessment. 

“Applicants also upload many thousands of files during an admissions cycle, so we use Perception Point on AppExchange to scan the uploaded files for any threats,” says Nguyen. “It’s integrated with Sales Cloud, and adds another layer of security. AppExchange is very good at extending Salesforce capability.”

It’s this high-level data security that Nguyen says is the top reason he chose to use Salesforce for Fulbright’s digital transformation. 

“The second reason is its scalability,” he explains. “Scalability is one of the big challenges for any platform, but if we reach 5,000 or 10,000 applications, I know Salesforce can handle that, and much more.” 

Nguyen says his team relied on support from Salesforce to overcome some early issues with the quality of their local deployment partner. The recent employment of an internal Salesforce developer has since brought Salesforce customisation and development in-house, which is achieving some impressive results. 

“About 70 to 80 percent of student life is now being managed on the One Stop portal, and our Student Life team is successfully managing hundreds of student service cases per month through Experience Cloud.”

Critically, Nguyen says the student data handover between the Admissions team and the Student Life team is now very smooth and secure, with the potential for human error largely eliminated.

The Admissions team is also using Salesforce dashboards to track progress toward admissions targets, and Nguyen’s team will continue to build data visualisation capability to support data-driven decisions. 

Nguyen and his team will also investigate artificial intelligence (AI) and Einstein Prediction to automate processes and potentially inform course advisors about signs students may be on course to experience problems before they occur. They are also investigating the use of AI to help course advisors suggest suitable study paths for individual students based on data from their admissions application.

But Nguyen says the next big step in Fulbright’s ongoing digital transformation will be to extend the Salesforce pipeline to include alumni outreach and communication. 

“As a nonprofit university, we believe many of our alumni will want to help other students, provide internship opportunities, or share their expertise back through our community,” he explains. “We also need to collect data from alumni to evaluate the success of our graduating students — whether they accept employment offers from big companies or continue their studies at other institutions.

“This will help to continue our growth into the future, and we know Salesforce gives us the security and scalability we need to become a world-class university.”