Salesforce Technology Evolution Helps DeVry Provide Student Care

Chris Campbell, Chief Information Officer, DeVry University

No one knows change like an organization that is a heavy user of Salesforce. Salesforce is dedicated to enhancing and evolving their product suite that pace of change is one of the things I enjoy most about Salesforce.

At DeVry University, we focus on student care which requires an aligned and agile team in an ever-changing industry. We select technology that supports the same values.

We have been a Salesforce customer since 2006, leveraging the platform to support our university partnerships, admissions processes, and student support services. Even then, Salesforce had an established desire to grow their product offering rapidly in partnership with their customers by committing to three releases per year. At that time, a new release document was about 30 pages. It was easy to go through the documentation and find new capabilities that would drive growth, improve process, or improve adoption of the platform in your organization.

Today, a typical release document is over 500 pages, and I rely on my team, my Customer Success Manager, and several bloggers who do an excellent job reviewing and highlighting key changes in each release. At DeVry, we focus on two key areas with each release. First, ensuring our Salesforce deployment does not become loaded with technical debt, which can be difficult to do as you balance the customizations in your organization and the capabilities that are or are not yet available in the Lightning interface. Second, we maintain a close relationship with our internal business partners, understand their goals and challenges, and look for opportunities to leverage the recently released Salesforce capabilities to advance our business objectives.

Salesforce has always been a visionary; looking ahead at the technology trends to enhance the CRM experience. We are excited about their innovations in artificial intelligence and the ease in which it is integrated into the platform

It’s an exciting time to be working with Salesforce. With each passing year, Salesforce strives to make it easier to deploy new functionality and is investing in providing a low code approach for their customers. This is enabling Admins and even developers to leverage process builders and flows instead of writing APEX code. Recently our developers are focusing on transitioning to the new Lightning Web Components to enable greater delivery speed for new apps and enhance our student service experience.

We take advantage of native functionality and connectors as much as possible. At times, that is often easier said than done if you have a complex technology ecosystem. At DeVry, we leverage partner applications and home-grown functionality built before Salesforce offered a particular capability, so it was a complex process to unravel all that customization and switch to new native product offerings. While it’s a journey, it is well worth it to take advantage of new capabilities and enable your organization to move the speed of change offered by Salesforce.

Salesforce has always been a visionary; looking ahead at the technology trends to enhance the CRM experience. We are excited about their innovations in artificial intelligence and the ease in which it is integrated into the platform. Just like most organizations, DeVry has vast amounts of data in our CRM and connected systems, and we need an easy way to analyze it, learn from it and ultimately take action. That means ensuring the information is visible and getting those next best actions into the hands of our advisors every day, so they are able to prioritize their work more effectively. This enables them to provide the appropriate care to our students when and where they need it.

With strong focus on our colleague and student experience, we are excited about the future of technology and the exponential pace of change. Student care and success is at the heart of our organization values, and Salesforce is a key partner for us to enable our advisors to deliver on that promise every day.

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