Personalized experiences drive admissions at the University of Salford

Admissions challenges with legacy systems

“The higher education sector in the UK is very competitive” says Dan Lees, CRM Manager at The University of Salford. With an abundance of universities competing for UK students, Salford decided to look abroad and target overseas applicants. Today, nearly one in six students at the University of Salford is from abroad. Unfortunately, while the university had tapped into a promising new market for students, an outdated admissions process was resulting in large numbers of abandoned applications. “We had a significant drop-off in terms of number of applications,” says Dan, “where someone would start an application but not make it all the way through the process.”

Speed is critical to the University of Salford’s strategy, and that’s no different when it comes to admissions. “Getting that initial contact with the student and processing their application as quickly as possible is essential to making a positive first impression” says Dan. Unfortunately, the university’s reliance on a multitude of systems was dramatically slowing down their admissions processes.

“We were using at least seven legacy systems,” says John McCarthy, Associate Chief Operating Officer, “which resulted in a lot of data problems. We were pushing data out of the student record systems into an old Access database that was actually written by a now-retired professor 15 years ago.” That hampered the university’s ability to deliver satisfying customer service, resulting in high abandonment rates. “There was real frustration from students who couldn’t track their application through the system after they’d applied, so they didn’t know what was going to happen next.”

Of course, it wasn’t just students who lacked a clear view of their application’s progress through the system—admissions officers at the University of Salford also struggled to track and identify at-risk applicants. Without clear visibility into the application process, the University of Salford couldn’t track abandonment rates, and without clarity around abandonment, the university had no way to identify and engage applicants at greater risk of abandonment.

These challenges became even more pronounced as the University of Salford shifted to prioritizing international students. Even though the university already had an admissions system in place for UK students, they adopted a new system for international applicants—which was quickly overwhelmed by an influx of new applications. “We estimated a 30% increase based on the abandonment rates we were seeing,” says John, “but we’ve seen a 300% increase in applications from overseas students for some courses.”

On top of separate systems for UK and international applicants, the University of Salford also had yet another system for web applicants. “The amount of manual intervention required to manage all these systems really became a problem for us. It slowed down our student services and meant that things were being missed. Our market research was in the right place, but the applications process was putting so many people off.”

Optimizing admissions with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

To help revamp the admissions process and make the applicant journey as smooth as possible, the University of Salford worked with Crimson, a Microsoft partner, to implement a new student portal using Microsoft Dynamics 365. “Prior to starting the CRM project, we didn’t have a Dynamics background,” says Dan, “but after building out an initial CRM operating model with Crimson, we were able to implement our own internal team to continue refining our CRM processes going forward.” Indeed, after being introduced to the capabilities of Dynamics 365 and Power Apps through Crimson, Salford’s small team was able to deliver an all-new admissions portal with powerful functionality in only 10 weeks.

For the University of Salford, automation was key—“we knew that we wanted a significant amount of automation within our processes,” recalls Dan. With Dynamics 365 and Power Apps, Dan and the rest of the team at Salford were able to automate a number of key processes within admissions, including sending students reminders about required documents and generating offer letters, greatly reducing clerical and financial errors. 

"By having the application go through a portal, we automatically know which documents students need to submit at any given point in the process,” says John. “If students don't get the documents in before the required time, that's not a problem because the system will send automated reminders to the students." 

Salford’s new student application portal has also transformed the experience for overseas applicants, who previously had to work with a multitude of third-party agents to representing the university. Now, a self-service agent portal built using Power Apps and the Power Platform automatically assigns students to a single agent for the entire application journey. Not only does this reduce the churn of individual students working with multiple agents, it also unifies all information shared by the student and agent on a single platform thus helping keep students and agents stay engaged while making it easier to monitor and audit real-time results throughout the admissions process. 

Scalable functionality to move forward

Already, the University of Salford has seen substantial results from the student portal. “The reactions to the admissions portal are really positive,” says Dan, and that sentiment is echoed by Nancy Cooke, Associate Director of International Recruitment at the University of Salford. “Before we implemented the portal, my enrollments might have been around 900,” Nancy says. “This year, we hit 1,800. If I didn’t have these tools or this portal, there is no way we would be able to serve that demand.” 

Since deploying its first solutions using Dynamics 365 and Power Apps, Salford has continued to expand its CRM beyond just the application process. "For us, it is really important to start to grow the CRM user base to have that 360-degree view of all the touch points with our customers," says Dan. 

As the University of Salford continues to look for new ways to stand out in a competitive higher-education landscape, Microsoft Dynamics 365 will remain pivotal to their future strategies. “I want us to have the best experience of anybody applying to any university in the UK—if not the world” says John. “Microsoft really helped us understand where the technology is going, and that’s going to help us give students an absolutely A-class interaction with us as an organization.