Client Overview
A higher education institution with over 28,000 students enrolled across various undergraduate, postgraduate, and continuing education programmes faced a major bottleneck.
Their recruitment, admissions, and student services teams each operated on separate platforms, with no visibility into the entire student lifecycle. The institution wanted to modernise prospect engagement, streamline admissions, and improve student retention from a single platform.
The Challenge
Potential students would receive inconsistent communications because recruitment and admissions ran on different systems. Application drop-off rates sat at 38%, partly because applicants had no way to check their status or upload missing documents without contacting the admissions team directly.
Once enrolled, student services had no access to recruitment or admissions history. Support staff repeatedly asked students for information already on file, creating a poor experience and adding unnecessary workload.
The Solution
Our team implemented Education Cloud as the system of record for the full student lifecycle, covering first enquiry through to alumni engagement. They built custom objects to handle programme-specific application requirements and qualification mapping across all 40-plus programmes.
An Experience Cloud applicant portal was developed with document upload, application status tracking, and live chat with admissions advisors. Marketing Cloud handled recruitment journeys for each programme, with content personalised by programme interest and application stage.
Flow-based automation was configured for application routing, conditional offer generation, and enrolment confirmation. We also built custom Lightning components for advisors to manage caseloads and identify at-risk students for early intervention.
The Impact
- Conversion: Application completion rate improved by 31%, reducing drop-off from 38% to 26%.
- Speed: Average offer turnaround dropped from 14 days to 5 days.
- Retention: First-year student retention improved by 9 percentage points after the early intervention workflow went live.
