Salesforce Team Enables Student Success With Peer Coach Texting
UTO Humble Heroes: Debbie Liu, Dawn Scott, Justin Sánchez, Frank Montoya, David Whitaker, Crystal Gustavson Miller and Raquel Garcia
The UTO Enterprise Salesforce Solutions team regularly works with departments across ASU to support student success by designing, building and managing custom tools. With the large-scale transition to remote learning motivated by COVID-19, this remarkable team rapidly implemented a solution to allow Student Success Coaches to connect with students via two-way texting.
The First-Year Success Center (FYS) supports first-year, second-year and transfer students through individualized peer coaching. According to Kevin Correa, Director of FYS, the Center has seen a decrease in student responsiveness to email and phone calls in recent years. “The ability to engage students in their preferred modality of communication, two-way texting, became a critical need for our center when we began the year,” Correa said. “Our university’s unexpected sudden transition to remote instruction and service delivery then made the need for texting dire.”
To enable the use of the two-way texting tool SMS Magic (via Salesforce) required a major custom development effort. According to Bonnie LeBlanc, Director of Enterprise Solutions, the team underwent a herculean effort to adapt this new tool, and did so extraordinarily quickly. "There were actually a lot of modifications that had to be done in order to take the SMS Magic platform and plug it in and make it operational," LeBlanc shared. The Enterprise Salesforce Solutions Team collaborated with the Provost Office’s Student Success Innovations team to ensure that the implementation of SMS Magic aligned with student need and the university’s existing student support structures.
This work is already having a powerful impact for students and Student Success Coaches. In their first week using this tool, FYS sent 9,000 texts to students and received almost 2,000 text responses -- a significant increase in responses compared to email and phone. "Using a new text message integration with Salesforce, First Year Success Center coaches have been able to connect with students that have been unresponsive to emails and phone calls since ASU transitioned to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Crystal Gustavson Miller, Associate Director of Student Success Innovations in the Office of the University Provost, explained. “Success coaches are checking in with them and sharing critical resources as students prepare for final exams.”
The Enterprise Salesforce Solutions Team and the Student Success Innovation team -- Debbie Liu, Dawn Scott, Justin Sánchez, Frank Montoya, David Whitaker, Crystal Gustavson Miller and Raquel Garcia -- were jointly recognized with a Champion Award at FYS’ end-of-semester celebration last week. This award “is presented to an individual and/or department for their advocacy, care, dedication, and for championing student success at the First-Year Success Center and the overall ASU community,” Correa explained. One Success Coach, Grace Lira, shared, “I just want to say how pleased I am with this new texting feature! This is the most responsive my students have been since this online transition, and I just sent out my first couple messages a couple of minutes ago.”
“When the Salesforce Team builds a solution to an urgent problem they are guided by both the current needs as well as the future,” Christine Whitney Sanchez, UTO’s Chief Culture Officer said. “They ask, what are the long term benefits and consequences of what we are building? They are known for their integrity, intentionality, adaptability, and pragmatism.”
Congratulations and many thanks to these exceptional UTO Humble Heroes!
UTO is full of unsung heroes -- Problem-Solvers, Jumper-Inners, Quiet Leaders, Cheerleaders and Champions, Agile and Flexible Doers and Attitude Winners. These team members embody the best of UTO in their everyday work. Who are these Humble Heroes? Our Culture + Creative + Communications (C3) team is creating a new digital series featuring the unsung heroes of UTO. Humble Heroes is a series of video and text stories featuring the people who make UTO run -- their stories, in their own words. These exceptional team members solve problems, provide support, and help students, staff, and faculty at ASU. While everyone is connected digitally, the idea is to share the journey of what our teams and colleagues accomplish.