Texas Tech maximizes retention and graduation rates with Salesforce.

Texas Tech University (Texas Tech, Tech, or TTU) is a tier one public research university in Lubbock, Texas. It's the flagship of the five-institution TTU System with 40,000+ students enrolled.

Difficulty identifying student needs could lead to missed support and increased risk of dropouts.

In the competitive landscape of higher education, fostering strong relationships between students and institutional leaders is crucial. Texas Tech recognizes that personalized support is key to attracting and retaining students.

At Texas Tech, counselors need to rely on a range of critical student information‌ — ‌ such as academic records, financial aid status, and mental health history ‌ — ‌ to offer timely support. However, without a unified view of this information, it was hard to identify students who needed help.

For example, students balancing work and studies often faced delays in receiving financial aid due to missing paperwork, while those dealing with mental health challenges struggled to access the support they needed. The lack of integrated data made it difficult for counselors to provide the personalized, timely interventions necessary to keep students engaged.

Recognizing this challenge, Texas Tech explored opportunities to adopt technology that would create a more integrated system, enabling counselors to provide timely and personalized support that enhances the overall student experience.

A self-service student portal increases engagement and retention.

To centralize all student-facing information, Texas Tech created the Raider Success Hub, a one-stop student portal that runs on Experience Cloud. This platform allows students to easily access their GPA, in-progress grades, assigned academic advisors, and more. It also includes an Einstein chatbot to help students schedule on-campus appointments, including those with career advisors.

With the Raider Success Hub, faculty, advisors, career counselors, and wellness coordinators now have a centralized resource for accessing student data.This unified access enables these professionals to offer tailored support services, ensuring students receive timely guidance and resources. By sharing academic materials, career development tools, event schedules, and wellness information in one place, the Hub fosters a more engaging and supportive environment. This personalized approach helps address students' unique challenges, ultimately increasing their likelihood of staying enrolled and successfully completing their degrees.

Salesforce for Education tracks prospective student data in one place.

Salesforce for Education centralizes prospective student data, giving Admissions staff a single view to offer personalized guidance throughout the recruitment process. With real-time insights into each student's interests and needs, they can tailor communications, such as proactively providing financial aid resources to those in need. The financial aid department can also access this information, streamlining support.

Admissions staff use Salesforce for Education to create detailed cases for each prospective student, capturing essential information, documents, and notes related to their applications. This can include application essays, academic records, letters of recommendation, and more. By organizing this information, the team improves collaboration and ensures that no student falls through the cracks. For example, if staff overlooks following up on missing documents like transcripts or recommendation letters, it could delay or jeopardize the student's application.

Marketing Cloud powers personalized student communications for a 58% increase in clicks. 

Texas Tech transformed its student communications with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, resulting in a remarkable 58% increase in click-through rates. By moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach, Texas Tech now delivers highly personalized messages tailored to the unique interests and needs of each student.

With Marketing Cloud, Texas Tech can gather data from various sources‌ — ‌social media, website interactions, and past engagement metrics‌ — ‌to gain insights into what resonates with prospective and current students. For example, during a re-enrollment campaign targeting students who were eligible to continue their studies but had not yet registered for classes, Texas Tech used this data to craft segmented email campaigns. Each message was personalized based on individual interests, such as specific programs or campus activities the students had previously shown interest in.

This strategic use of Marketing Cloud not only improved engagement but also fostered a sense of connection with students. By sending tailored reminders about upcoming deadlines, personalized resources, and relevant campus events, Texas Tech significantly increased the likelihood that students would complete their registration, ultimately enhancing retention rates and ensuring more students remain on track to graduate.

Predictive analytics and alert notifications help staff identify at-risk students.

Advisors and staff use CRM Analytics with predictive AI to generate a retention risk score. They analyze a wide range of student data points like grades, academic standing, term hours attempted, and total holds at term end to predict their likelihood of continuing their education at Texas Tech. 

Student Success teams can also get automated alerts and notifications on things like a student’s class attendance and academic performance. This let’s them take action quickly, by eliminating time-consuming, manual processes, like pulling reports for at-risk students or updating students for important dates such as course registration, final exams, commencement, and more.

Expert guidance helps Texas Tech realize value quickly and become self-sufficient with Salesforce.

Texas Tech University partnered with Salesforce Professional Services to build the Raider Success Hub. Professional Services also created a predictive model for capturing persistence risk — the likelihood that a student will drop out before they graduate. To determine the risk, the model looks at several attributes like grades, academic standing, term hours, and financial holds. This provides the right information for Student Success Specialists to anticipate and identify student needs, opening the door for personalized support, outreach, and interventions.

Professional Services guides Texas Tech on strategic initiatives like governance, data strategy and management, and deriving actionable insights. Additionally, through Signature Success, the university gains personalized enablement, expert system optimization, and access to Trailblazer Bootcamp to upskill its team.

The Salesforce Platform is the only solution that connects insights across recruitment, admissions, student services, advancement, and marketing. Salesforce’s unique ability to create a 360-degree view of every student allows for a holistic understanding of each student's academic journey and preferences. This helps higher education institutions take action with the personalized engagements, support, proactive advice, and experiences students need to thrive.