QUT has opened a new avenue in its multi-year digital connections program, using data and AI to improve the ability of frontline agents to support future students at the university.
(L-R) Alex Calder (Accenture) and James Rail (QUT)
Digital connections started in 2022, laying foundations including a core CRM based on Salesforce for Education, and creating a “true 360-degree view” of current and future students, as well as alumni.
Program director James Rail told Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference that the intent was to elevate service centres into “experience centres through which we can drive better connection and relationships across key stages of a person’s journey” with QUT.
“We’re seeking new ways to attract, connect and interact with our learners,” Rail said.
The Salesforce-based foundation is now bedded down, with Rail noting that by the end of the year, QUT “will celebrate 24 separate and distinctly different business groups using a single [Salesforce] org as an enabler to their service ecosystem.”
“Across those groups, 750 frontline agents will use the platform to provide personalised support, and over 2 million pieces of data have been aggregated and ingested to ensure that we have a real-time rich view of the people that we’re supporting.”
The Salesforce-based core also enabled simplification of the technology environment that once supported this student service and engagement activity.
“We’ve been able to simplify our digital ecosystem in the process by removing ‘like’ systems, local databases and spreadsheets to introduce commonality and consistency in our practice,” Rail said.
Although the foundations were set and results were being seen, Rail said QUT “didn’t want to stand still”.
“The challenge for an implementation of this size, complexity and pace is not to sit back and appreciate just what’s been done, it’s to think about how we can continue to drive innovation, harnessing what we have and staying true to our value proposition and strategic imperative to enrich the experience we provide,” he said.
That evolution took shape at the Salesforce World Tour event in Sydney earlier this year, with two Einstein tools – Copilot and Prompt Builder – receiving heavy billing in product presentations.
Accenture revealed it is playing a role in this evolution of digital connections last month.
“We are most recently centred around the nurturing and servicing of future students driven by [Salesforce] Service Cloud and case management functionality,” Accenture’s A/NZ Salesforce education lead Alex Calder said.
“This seemed like a very logical starting point, an area we believed AI especially could drive tangible benefits to learners’ experience, whilst building efficiencies in the way the team members could complete their duties.
“The plans were hatched to develop a rapid implementation using out-of-the-box Einstein, custom prompts and base Data Cloud functionality to deliver that added value.
“The five targets that we agreed to be utilised were Einstein Copilot, Case Classification, Article Recommendations, Prompt Builder and Data Cloud.
“A four-week development schedule was drawn up to make this a reality,” Calder added, with Accenture resources from Sydney, Brisbane, India and the Philippines involved.
Both Rail and Calder went through the five targeted Salesforce tools that were adopted, and what impact these have had so far on serving the needs of future students.
Einstein Copilot, they said, is used to summarise case history and view key interactions and actions taken to date.
The aim is to “enable service agents to easily query our data to understand who they’re supporting”.
Rail said that Case Classification deals with uncategorised cases mostly raised through email, WhatsApp or social channels. It determines a classification automatically, with a confidence level.
“It [aims] to give back time to advisers by analysing information in an inquiry and based on the content and historical data captured from other categories so it can automatically classify and summarise that case for us,” Rail said.
“By classifying the case on creation, we derive faster insights into where our demand is at any point in time and can prioritise our advisers to respond quickly.”
Other tooling puts relevant knowledge base articles in front of agents so they can answer questions from a future student accurately; and summarises all correspondence between the university and future student to make it easier to either hand over between advisors or to conclude it.
Rail pointed to plans in the immediate future to evolve the data and AI work in the digital connections program.
“We will continue to focus on advisor efficiency,” he said.
“With Einstein in the flow of work, we will continue to build out custom prompts to boost productivity when triaging, responding to and wrapping up cases across multiple service channels.
“In particular, voice or real-time categorisation will be game-changing, providing agents with quick visibility of what a call is about whilst it’s happening, and … real-time next best actions will ensure that our agents are further armed to respond to cases, regardless of complexity, and be right the first time.”
Rail noted the evolution of QUT’s use of Salesforce is very much in keeping with the broader approach taken with the digital connections program.
“Our entire ethos in our implementation of Salesforce more broadly has been very much around iterative delivery – identifying ways of implementing change that builds upon itself,” he said during a separate presentation at Dreamforce.
“When we tackled our AI and data implementation, in a very short timeframe, we did so with that same viewpoint.
“We looked at how we can put something into the hands of our frontline so they can see it, they can understand it, they can get excited by it, and then they can use it, and we can grow with them as their maturity increases.”
Ry Crozier attended Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.