Oracle Markie Customer Experience Excellence “Strategist Award” Nomination for Murdoch University.

Murdoch University is dedicated to providing high-quality education, conducting impactful research, and contributing to the community. Its diverse course offerings span arts, sciences, business, health, and engineering, reflecting a commitment to comprehensive academic exploration. Upholding core values of Authenticity, Integrity, Respect, Inclusivity, and Openness, Murdoch University aims to advance knowledge and serve as a creative force for current and future generations.

Central to Murdoch's mission is its vision to be widely recognized as the University of choice for those valuing inclusion, curiosity, innovation, and positive social impact. Striving to lead in education, teaching, and sustainability-focused research, it endeavors to foster a thriving, diverse, and inclusive community. With a personalized approach where lecturers engage students individually, Murdoch University creates a supportive and friendly atmosphere conducive to learning.

What distinguishes Murdoch University is its relentless pursuit of excellence across various fronts. From its longstanding commitment to research excellence, making groundbreaking discoveries, to its advocacy for sustainability, environmental conservation, and social justice, Murdoch stands out as a beacon of progressive academia. Additionally, its unwavering dedication to equity, diversity, and inclusion, along with a profound respect for First Nations peoples and cultures, solidifies its reputation as one of the most inclusive institutions in Australia. This unique blend of academic prowess, community engagement, and commitment to positive change underscores Murdoch University as a dynamic and forward-thinking institution shaping the future of education and research.

Challenges faced.

A primary focus area for Murdoch University over the past 3 years has been the optimization of our future student recruitment capabilities.

Several challenges were identified in this space, with the most fundamental issue being the siloed and inconsistent approach to lead capture and nurture. Disparate business areas were capturing leads and prospects into different platforms and nurturing those contacts in their own ways. This siloed approach caused multiple issues, including:

• No single source of truth for lead and prospect information
• No single unified view of the recruitment pipeline
• Duplication of capabilities across multiple platforms and business areas
• A poor lead/prospect experience, with a lack of consistent branding and messaging
• No clear visibility of conversion of leads/prospects to applicants, and from applicants to students

A strategic approach to leveraging data to address these challenges, uncover insights and drive strong results was achieved by focusing on 3 core elements – pipeline, lead capture and applicant communication to support real optimization and growth opportunities and the delivery of impactful results. Leveraging their data and building integrations across their ecosystem was key.

• Pipeline: A single unified recruitment pipeline, spanning the entire recruitment lifecycle from lead/prospect to current student, was created in Oracle Service Cloud. This provided the University with a single source of truth for all leads, prospects, and applicants as they move through the pipeline. The solution was further augmented with the development of real-time integration between Callista (the University’s Student Management System) and Oracle Service Cloud, ensuring that as applicants move through the admissions and enrolments processes in Callista, a real time view of progression through the pipeline is visible within Oracle Service Cloud.
• Lead Capture: While previously leads were captured through multiple channels, and using various form technologies, work was undertaken to ensure that all leads and prospects are captured into the unified recruitment pipeline as the initial point of entry in our CRM ecosystem. Lead Capture forms were re-designed and developed in a single form technology using Oracle Intelligent Advisor, ensuring consistency in branding, lead/prospect experience, and technology solutions.
• Applicant Communication: One of the most innovative initiatives undertaken at the University has been the design, development and implementation of ‘nudge’ campaigns. The Recruitment and Retention Nudge Campaign initiative was launched with the aim of delivering significant applicant and student experience enhancements, while simultaneously reducing manual staff overheads, through the automation of ‘nudge’ email communications / touch points. Nudge campaigns are delivered by multiple teams, leveraging various enterprise platforms including the Student Management System, the Learning Management System, Advanced Analytics, Integration, and the enterprise CRM (Oracle Service Cloud).

How did Kyte and Oracle help?

Murdoch University engaged Kyte Consulting to deliver solutions to the described problems. Working together as an agile team, Murdoch University and Kyte Consulting delivered the following functionality:

• Pipeline: Collaborating with Kyte, we optimized our future student engagement by calculating and assigning stages to each lead/prospect/applicant record within the Oracle Service Cloud pipeline. This allows us to use segmentation and enables precise communication targeting. Responsive Forms with Intelligent Advisor (IA): Our IA-powered responsive forms empower both prospective and current students to effortlessly submit enquiries from their portable devices, enhancing accessibility and user experience.
• Automated Nudges: Leveraging Oracle Service Cloud in conjunction with several other enterprise platforms and capabilities, we have fully automated several applicant conversion and current student retention emails.
• Recruitment Nudges: target applicants to nudge (convert) them through the recruitment pipeline, for example by automatically encouraging them to respond to an offer, provide required documentation to allow for application assessment, or enroll in units.
• Retention Nudges: target current students to nudge them back on track where, for example, they have failed to log into the Learning Management System for 7 consecutive days, or their course completion rate is falling below a set threshold as part of progression monitoring.
• These solutions have resulted in substantial time and cost savings. By automating previously labour-intensive data extraction and segmentation processes, we’ve saved over 700 man-hours, equivalent to more than $50,000 annually.
• Additionally, our streamlined lead/prospect and applicant experiences ensure timely and consistent messaging, complete with clear calls to action.
• Lead and Prospect Email Nurture: While Oracle Service Cloud has become the system of record for all leads and prospects, we have developed real-time integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud to ensure that all leads and prospects who meet the definition of ‘marketing contacts’ (i.e. we have an email address, the opt-in is set to ‘yes’ and we know how and when the contact opted in) are made available to the Marketing team in Salesforce for email nurture campaigns. Now, for the first time, leads and prospects captured into Oracle Service Cloud via inbound enquiries are shared with Marketing for email lead nurture (previously these leads and prospect were not shared resulting in huge loss of marketing opportunities).
• Real-Time Events: Oracle Service Cloud communicates real-time events (preferences, contact updates, etc.) to Salesforce Marketing, ensuring that Marketing are always acting on the most up-to-date information, particularly a contacts opt-in status and current study area preferences.
• Integration: These solutions demonstrate the successful integration of Oracle Service Cloud, Oracle Intelligent Advisor, Microsoft Azure, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, empowering Murdoch University’s commitment to excellence.

Achieved Benefits:

Qualitative

1. Significantly enhanced lead/prospect experience through the delivery of consistent, timely email nurture campaigns, delivered in a standardized way from a single platform. Consistent branding and messaging ensure an optimized experience for prospective students.
2. For applicants, automated conversion nudges ensure an optimized experience, keeping Murdoch University front-of-mind when applicants are actively considering applying to other universities.
3. Vastly improved staff experience realized through the implementation of Oracle Intelligent Advisor forms for Additional Support (At Risk) reporting for academic staff, as well as an Oracle Intelligent Advisor form for student-facing support staff to capture student enquires and interactions into Service Cloud.
4. For current students, the retention nudge campaigns ensure timely communication with clear calls to action where corrective tasks are required to keep them ‘on track’, thereby improving student retention.

Quantitative

1. In the 3 years since the introduction of a marketing opt-in function on the Oracle Service Cloud contact workspace, web chat and the future student enquiry form (developed in Oracle Intelligent Advisor), a total of 5,500 leads and prospects have opted in to receive marketing communications from Murdoch University, representing an 82% increase compared with the previous 3-year period.
2. With the implementation of real-time integration between Oracle Service Cloud and Salesforce, the Marketing team now have access to all enquiry leads and prospects, realizing a 230% increase in target audience size for email marketing campaigns.
3. The implementation of real-time integration between the student management system (Callista) and Oracle Service Cloud, coupled with the introduction of segmentation reports, saved approximately 700-man hours ($50,000 AUD) per year for time previously spent extracting data from the Student Management System (Callista) into Excel, manually segmenting the data and them importing lists into Oracle Service Cloud.
4. Significantly improved engagement metrics through the implementation of nudges. For example, following the implementation of the domestic applicant unconditional offer nudge, in the first 6 months a total of 1450 nudge emails were sent, with a 74% open rate and 52% click-through rate, resulting in 533 acceptances (equating to approximately $20m AUD or $13m+ USD in maximum potential revenue)

Authors: Ursula Berner / Bart Kuiper