Blogs

CX at Alliance 2020: Changing Lenses & Shifting Focus

By Lorne Henne posted 01-28-2020 09:44 AM

  

Improving the constituent experience is the focus of everyone in Higher Education – from the people who work in recruiting and Admissions through those working in Alumni Relations – putting our best foot forward and providing exemplary service to the people we serve is our number one goal. Improving processes and making it easier for students and ourselves to do business, brings true value to our institutions.

At one time, the HEUG was strictly a user group – just focusing on the technical challenges faced by all of us in our efforts to serve our populations. In some ways, we’re still dealing with the nitty gritty of helping each other to get a page to work, a new process installed, an update or patch working. Those times are changing though - as more and varied technologies fill our toolboxes, we’re beginning to realize that in order to continue to help each other, we need to shift focus, and see things through the lens of business process improvement. In short, no matter what new technology you deploy, if it supports a bad or clumsy process - it improves nothing. Don’t get me wrong – over the years I’ve been extremely grateful to my HEUG colleagues who have provided code or technical solutions – but on deeper reflection, I’ve been even more impressed with those HEUG colleagues who’ve shown me completely new approaches to a common problem.  I see that the strength of the HEUG lies in the spread of innovative ideas and tactics shared by its diverse members. 

This year’s CX track is focused on 4 main themes, each of which I’ll cover in subsequent blogs: The Service/Help desk, Social Media, Student Data and Change & Implementation.  In each of these areas, we have sessions that appeal to the wider array of the HEUG members, from Admissions to Technical and Reporting folks, and everyone in between. Each of our CX sessions will be highlighted in the coming days, so stay tuned for more information.

I’d also like for you to join us for two great additional CX sessions that we’ll be participating in at Alliance 2020.

The CX Campfire Session will be an informal discussion where 4 members of our Advisory group will talk about our CX implementations, our challenges and opportunities, and share our experiences.  Discussion will also center on CX strategy – what people have found to be effective in engaging their constituents, how we work with end users to educate and suggest approaches, and some of the challenges involved in leading engagement efforts in their institutions.  We’re very interested in sharing our war stories and joining attendees in learning from our discussions.

We’ll also be showcasing the Cloud and Oracle Policy Automation in the Peer Demo track. See this technology at work in a short 15-minute live demonstration showing the seamless flow of student enquiry data from the customer forms on Oracle Service Cloud through the integrations and campaigns in Oracle Marketing Cloud. Anyone interested in recruiting and/or automation workflow will be impressed by the ease of this demo.

So, I very much hope that you’ll join me on our journey to change our lens and shift the focus away from a single technical solution, and embrace the views afforded by looking at our work from a larger perspective.

Register for these sessions using the Alliance 2020 Mobile App – available here!

Session # 6948 : Supporting the Constituent Experience - “Tales from the CX Frontlines”

Session # 7130 : CX, Oracle Student Management and Student Financials Planning: Some Examples of Functionality Differentiators in the Cloud

1 comment
0 views

Comments

01-30-2020 12:40 AM

Great post!

Lorne, thanks for this excellent post.  You capture the key demands on all of us today - finding a better way to do what we've always done, seeking improved outcomes!  And, it looks like the CX track! at Alliance will have excellent content