10/10 for student onboarding experience? Salesforce makes it possible.

SWPS University is the leading institution for psychology in Poland. Established in 1996, the university specializes in social sciences, humanities and arts, and caters to 17,000 students across six campuses.

Bringing data visibility throughout the student journey to optimise the university experience.

Today’s students expect more from further education—starting with the application process all the way to graduation and career advice. Universities need 360-degree visibility throughout the student journey, giving all departments, from admissions to alumni, a single view of student data.

To keep up with an increasing number of applicants, SWPS needed to advance its legacy IT systems that were struggling to cope with surging application numbers. What began as a project to transform the admissions process sparked an enterprise-wide effort to streamline and personalise the entire student experience, from applicant to alumni. SWPS now offers fast, tailored communications, user-friendly communities, and responsive support.

SWPS gains 360-degree visibility of the student journey to meet high expectations.

To understand students’ wishes, SWPS went straight to the source to find out what their ideal experience looked like. Respondents revealed they wanted fast, simple services with a personal touch—guided self-service, user-friendly communities, and quickly available support.

The university rebuilt the admissions platform on Service Cloud, supplemented by the candidate portal embedded in Experience Cloud. The team worked to design and implement Knowledge Base and Student Success, which acts as a central integrated platform for multiple services ensuring enhanced personal data security - since documents don’t leave the system - and a reduced risk of data error or fraud. Career services was the first department to go live with the solution. 

Candidate and student journeys were developed with Marketing Cloud, and the university integrated Service Cloud with the telephony system to provide better visibility of cases and seamless support. These were the first steps towards achieving 360-degree visibility from application to alumni.

Students are empowered through self-service options and real-time alerts.

For applicants, the journey begins in a dedicated admissions portal that guides them through every step of the process. The experience is personalised based on an individual’s age, language, location, and specific interests. Such has been its impact that since 2022, the university has been able to increase the number of consultations for candidates during the admissions process by 60% without having to increase the number of advisors.

Meanwhile, student services optimised onboarding and launched custom journeys, created in Journey Builder, to give students instant access to the right information. Students can stay notified in real time thanks to automated communications. For example, if a lecture is cancelled, the university can text students an immediate update. Internship selection, approval, and settlement are also wholly digitalised: students receive updates on deadlines and status changes, as well as when action is required from them or when advisors add comments. These automated workflows free the team to focus on tasks, such as checking exam results. Students can also self-serve knowledge articles in several languages in their student portal, with Einstein supporting AI-powered searches. Being able to access information themselves resulted in a 75% reduction in the number of enquiries and requests submitted by students to the service team in the first month of the academic year alone.  

Data drives relevant communications and optimises the student experience.

Students are now able to check their development profiles, track details, and choose internships through the platform based on their interests and field of study. They also receive feedback here on strengths and areas for improvement from external and internal internship supervisors. Additionally, students can select and apply for job offers, and tailor their career path according to their specific preferences by sharing those with career counsellors – with whom they can book meetings online or in-person, all through the platform.

The team created student profiles and tracked details from chosen social clubs to areas of interest, sharing this information with the careers service to help students approaching graduation find the right opportunities. In line with student wishes, SWPS replaced once static job boards with the dynamic service of Knowledge Base and Student Success. Employers can post vacancies or internships directly in the student portal, connecting employers and students directly. The careers team also uses Marketing Cloud to share relevant listings with segmented audiences rather than manually emailing potential candidates. And with all student data now securely stored in a single source of truth, the university can build relevant, targeted communications in Marketing Cloud. 

Automated services and workflows create a game-changing transformation.

While the university’s Salesforce journey is ongoing, automation has been a game changer. What began as a project to transform the admissions process sparked an enterprise-wide effort to streamline and personalise the complete student experience.

From keeping students informed if a lecture is cancelled to greeting them by name on the phone, Salesforce helps the team stay connected with students and prospects without increasing headcount. 

Dashboards also support more data-driven decisions, such as identifying when volumes of applications and cases peak so the university can scale up resources and set SLAs accordingly. As a result, the university has achieved a 40% reduction in application processing time for Polish high school graduates - from five minutes to three minutes - and a 50% reduction in the time taken to process foreign students. Currently, the service team answers calls within 70 seconds, 98% faster than three years ago when the average time was 60 minutes, and 97% of cases are handled within 24 hours - representing a 93% increase in response time from two years ago.

Initial feedback captured by the university to keep students at the centre of the project has been positive. In 2023/24 students returned a satisfaction rating of 79% - an increase of over 10% on the previous year. They highlight the admissions process and friendliness of staff as being the most impressive features of the university. The team has also rolled out a feature so students can schedule appointments from the portal, with all student societies now digital.

With 30,500 applications a year, varying course requirements, and students that expect career development advice as much as a diploma, Poland’s SWPS University needed to align student-facing service systems and data to unlock 360-degree visibility. With CRM, AI, and data unified on a single trusted platform, the university is excelling in delivering personalised engagement with every student across all touchpoints. Automation has been transformational in streamlining the student journey from application to graduation.