Before 2020, the business school lacked central visibility of customers and teams were working in silos, especially around customer communications. This caused high unsubscribe rates on emails that weren’t striking the right note.

Saïd Business School launched its contact strategy to become more learner-focused. Here’s what that looked like for its staff:

• Teams came together to share pain points and realised they were working across multiple systems with no visibility of what colleagues were doing or the wider interests of prospects and customers.
• The school changed its digital strategy from being employee-focused to customer-focused, considering the needs of the customer at every touchpoint of the redesign.
• The Einstein 1 platform was reimplemented with this in mind and became the central hub for the learner experience, unlocking Customer 360. Previously, seven teams were using Salesforce and other systems in silos, with no central source of truth.
• Automated workflows freed staff from time-consuming admin. For the marketing team, this means less time manually sending emails and more time creating great content and thinking about the learner experience. Up to 70% of emails could be automated in the future, which would be a huge efficiency gain.
• Salesforce simplifies compliance, keeps data clean and secure, and makes it easier to manage marketing consent.

Einstein 1 transformed the learner experience:

• Marketing Cloud segments contacts by interests, course, and status so they can be sent on more relevant and personalised journeys.
• Einstein intelligence makes sure contacts don’t get duplicate emails and that they’re nurtured without being oversaturated. It optimises send times to maximise open rates, which has increased engagement between 10-20%.
• When prospects become MBA students, they get access to a community built on Experience Cloud. This provides a central hub to learn about events, browse frequently asked questions – which are kept relevant based on data captured in Salesforce – and plan their time at the school.
• Although there’s a massive appetite for in-person learning and networking at this prestigious university, students have all the support they need in their pocket. With Service Cloud, service agents currently handle 1,000 cases digitally and up to 6,000 in person, but can give the same fast, personalised responses however the student wants to engage.
• After graduation, alumni join a digital community to maintain connections with cohorts and professionals. This is particularly valuable to customers taking an executive MBA, and by capturing conversations in Salesforce, the university can learn about their wants and needs.

Staff are becoming more data-driven:

• Insights are used to track engagement, find advocates, share best practices, benchmark against industry standards, and track efficiency gains – such as the 5,000 saving in man hours since rolling out the platform.
• They use a mix of standard Salesforce dashboards, Tableau, and Marketing Cloud Intelligence powered by Datorama depending on the need. For example, marketers track campaign engagement, attrition, cost per lead, and results against industry benchmarks. In the future, financial data is being integrated with Salesforce and visualised in Tableau so customer-facing teams, faculty, and senior leadership can see all aspects of the customer journey in full.

• Seven email systems across nine business units have been centralised, unlocking greater visibility of the customer journey, interests, and communications.
• 20 teams onboarded in phase one.