Published on the 21/11/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
The power and promise of analytics have been showcased at the Dreamforce conference as organisations mature from collecting data to mining it for value…
Salesforce’s heritage as a cloud CRM company has seen its users collect and store large volumes of customer data – reservoirs swollen in recent years by information collected from mobile platforms and social networks. Multiple sessions at this week’s Dreamforce conference being held in San Francisco have shown how organisations are now mining that data for value.
Alan Wilsker, VP of IT and customer service for Rhythm Technologies, which manufactures cardiac monitors said that the company had data relating to 120,000 people and 22 million hours of patient data. “Salesforce.com has become the data repository and system of record and reporting,” he said.
Meanwhile online retailer Trunk Club has deployed a Salesforce system that links social and mobile content with company-collected information to predict customer preferences and use that to select clothes sent to clients on consignment.
One of the very few Australian Salesforce users to present at the Dreamforce conference, despite the 1100 individual sessions running over the four day event, was Open Universities Australia which has been using a Salesforce system to collect and manage student data in a bid to improve retention rates and student engagement.
OU Australia’s main role is to acquire students for Australia’s leading 20 universities. It also operates the online learning platform Open2Study.
Information collected from students is used to prompt and steer conversations between student advisors and students to gauge how well students are settling in to their courses. Where students report problems they will be contacted first by a student coach, and if necessary by a trained counsellor.
Early results are encouraging. According to Claire Hopkins, executive general manager of student experience, who presented at Dreamforce in San Francisco this week, here has been a 50 percent reduction in university withdrawal rates, an 18 percent improvement in pass rates and an 11 percent lift in retention rates since the new system was deployed. For the universities that OU Australia serves that translates to real revenues and improved student satisfaction levels.
According to chief executive officer Paul Wappett there has also been a U-turn in the way that OU Australia’s call centre operates; “We used to ask them to make sales in eight minutes. Now we ask them to collect 40-50 bits of information.”
Chief information officer Michelle Beveridge said that she had a team developing analytics to be able to interpret the data and profile the performance of different student cohorts in order to further improve student engagement. She added that there were also plans to develop predictive learning analytics to support students enrolled on the Open2Study online platform.
While much of the person\al information gathered on the Salesforce cloud is relatively pedestrian, as a student is escalated through the support system the personal information stored can become quite sensitive and in some cases include details of mental health issues or family violence.
Beveridge said that OU Australia had taken legal advice before signing up for the Salesforce cloud as student data is held in the company’s Tokyo data centre. She said that students were advised before information was collected that their data would be held overseas, adding that to date this had not been a deal-breaker for any student.
The author attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.
