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There is a general consensus in higher education that institutions of nearly all types and sizes need to improve persistence and completion rates. While there have been slight improvements in recent years, data indicates that only half of the students complete degrees at the institution at which they start. Studies have suggested that many students complete their degrees at other institutions, taking completion to about 62%. Student departure remains a mystery for most educational leaders. They feel a compelling need to understand and fix the causes of attrition. There is no shortage of knowledge or reference on what works in student retention. Given all that, it is surprising that rates have only gradually improved. This could be for two reasons. First, institutions are flooded with data points and may not be able to identify the ones that must be tracked or which ones help would explain the persistence patterns of their students. Second, we may lack the connections between institutional supports and students who need them to see if we are truly doing something about it. Organize the Data Points with a Model Student success models can be helpful for educational leaders who wish to identify the key aspects associated with student success, persistence and completion. While there are many models to choose from, one of the most talked about is Tinto’s “Theory of Student Departure”. The model helps track the student lifecycle and identifies areas where both student and college attributes can impact the decision to stay in or leave an educational program. Tinto’s model, when analysed and condensed, suggests that there are five key areas where students may encounter challenges that disrupt their educational careers. Likewise, they may identify areas where students may have strengths that boost their success: Academic Integration Academic Integration in a college can be segmented into three parts: preparation, transition, and performance. These three can be connected sequentially, meaning lack of preparation can lead to a poor transition and weak ongoing performance, or they can occur in isolation, disconnected from one another. Experienced faculty and advisors probably know several cases where poorly prepared students were highly successful, well-prepared students failed, and those from both groups realized a trajectory in line with their levels of preparation. Social Integration Social Integration addresses the extent to which the student is able to connect with peers within the educational ecosystem. Adult learners often bond with other adults through common programs. The extent to which students have successfully bonded with their peers can be hard to read; it is not usually a one-size-fits-all model of social integration and student information systems are not typically built to collect and report the data that may be associated with this important area of student success. This aspect may also be useful when working on student faculty engagement.  This form of social integration in which students feel heard, seen and accepted by faculty is important especially for under-represented groups to feel a sense of belonging at their institution. Financial Support Financial Support is critical to enable a student to be able to afford education at that institution.. For those who complete annual aid applications, the resulting calculations serve as a proxy for the ability to pay. The data collected for this purpose does not include factors that can help a student afford costs such as support from family or those that can hamper affordability such as need of a student to work to support a elderly dependent household. We often have a different perception of need-based aid than how students view the issue: the amount of the education bill, less the aid is the amount to be paid or financed. More often than not, it is this bottomline number that impacts students’ real or perceived ability to remain in an educational program. It can also impact the value perception of the educational experience. Is this experience worth it’s price? Goal Clarity Goal Clarity indicates the degree to which a student recognises why they are enrolled in certain college, and the end goal of the program being pursued. Certain institutions might assume that a chosen program or subject translates to goal clarity but data often shows that students change subjects two to three times before getting a degree. A few of the factors that can determine whether a student may have clarity about program they have chosen are its requirements, their personal ability to meet required standards and their practical experience in that field. Faculty and advisors will spot a common situation of students feeling lost when they are unable to pursue a popular program. Support of Family and Friends One of the least investigated areas for measuring student persistence is the support of family. As the number of college students grows, the perception of the college experience amongst their friends and families may differ than those who come from families where college attendance is common. However, that does not mean all families don’t support of first-generation students across the board. In fact, many families place high value on college education. Having said that, there may not be an obvious relation between the program curriculum and career, time spent away from class, student services, and the potential of associated programs for providing key career skills. Create a Framework of Indicators for Lagging Using these five aspects of higher education as a model, it is possible to establish a data framework that measures what we know about students and their probability to continue and succeed. Lagging indicators are most commonly available data points that reflect things that have already occurred. These include grade point average (GPA), which don’t reveal student successes and struggles with certain concepts and skills. They also include the marks of courses finished in a term, unpaid fees that disallow registration for another term, abandonment of courses midway etc. While these data may support analysis of past activities, rarely do they provide understanding of current students. For insight that is “current”, institutions need data indicators that reveal outcomes in real time. Lagging indicator data is important. It allows the institution to conduct detailed, multi- parameter analysis to reveal student groups that may enter into high-risk situations. It may also aid in identifying remedies and support structures to support future students who may have the same characteristics. Too often, these analyses are univariate, such as GPA and one-year retention rate. Even while doing multivariate analyses, the data silos and not sufficient to form regression models with retention values high enough to explicitly establish the differences between students who continue and those who don’t. Human behaviour is complex and is driven by many factors. Consequently, analysis needs to be detailed and based on comprehensive data to allow analysts to investigate multiple factors to understand the patterns of their students. Leading indicators allow institutions to impact persistence in real time. Awareness of a student not connecting with faculty as expected, assignments, fellow students, lets the institution to intervene and attempt to resolve the issue before the student feels isolated to a degree that compels him/her to leave. Identifying students who have pending program fees within the term, which usually happens because loans applied on parent creditworthiness, have not been approved, allows the institution to intervene and find a solution. The institution can support in bridging the gap and mitigate the stress felt by the student before it becomes overwhelming. These are but a few examples of how leading indicators can be used to impact student persistence. Identify and Address Gaps There is typically more data available on lagging indicators than leading indicators, which implies that we have been more attuned to collecting and using data that reflect information on something that already occurred. It must be re-iterated that lagging indicators are help in analysing patterns and suggest interventions for future students. There is far less data available and used as leading indicators, however, and this implies an emerging area of practice that demands more attention. Analyses need to have robust and comprehensive data, yet those tend to exist in various systems/data silos. Institutions that have data warehouses are one step ahead; identifying the important data and extracting them from those systems may still be a challenge, even with solutions in place. Many other institutions that lack these data tools find themselves wishing for better insights and tools to help them collect, assemble and analyze their data. Certain areas suggest polls or surveys. While there are a number of solutions available today, these can also have limitations. One of these is the timing of offering a survey to new or current students, when receive the data back and place those into the hands of those who need it (especially advisors). Some of these instruments allow comparisons of student responses at your institution to others, which can be helpful, but that may be outweighed by the timing, where these data then become lagging, not leading, indicators. Short polls, such as those that ask students to rate how they are doing that day with facial emojis, may capture those who are feeling overwhelmed. Longer polls, that tease out the nuances of family and friend support, shouldn’t exceed 10 questions and five would likely increase response rates. Survey overload can be avoided by good planning and timely distribution of short polls and surveys. Connect the Dots (and the Data) Collecting, assembling, analyzing and acting upon a robust dataset is an evolutionary process. Institutions should start with what they have and gradually augment and enhance their data and its usage as part of a quality development process. Knowing what the desired state looks like is important to creating a strong road map toward it. Assembling a robust set of lagging indicators means getting data from multiple systems, modules and tables in to a unified dataset. Once aggregated, data analysis and visualization should reveal the interaction of the data categories within the framework. Human behavior is often complex and more often than not the decision to stay or leave a program is a mix of multiple factors originating from various parts of that experience. And there may be outside factors as well such as childcare, work pressure etc. External factors may be harder to capture through these data collection mechanisms and may not reveal the true picture. A proper assessment of the internal factors within the control of the institution will augment the analysis and sidestep simplistic, one dimensional solutions about why students are staying/leaving. Assembling and using a robust set of leading indicators is often a tremendous challenge at the most forward-thinking institutions. Is anyone following up to check if any student needs help on unpaid balances? Does the financial aid office, who may be equipped to discuss solutions, even know that this has occurred? Is financial stress causing the student to look for additional outside work, such that they have less time to read and complete assignments? Is the early alert system complicated to use by faculty?  Do residence hall advisors have a similar alerting mechanism for issues they might spot? Who is following up on these and what data do they have that will help them facilitate an empathetic and inform conversation with the student before they make a decision to leave? Adopting a case management methodology to understand student persistence and success has been used by institutions in first-year programs. Some of the more remarkable results have linked students to institutional resources, as well as community services and supports, in a “wrap-around” approach to student success. These approaches can only work when cases are surfaced and those empowered to act have sufficient information to meaningfully interact with the student. It requires that the information from disparate systems is brought together. Improving student outcomes also requires that the care teams and staff can see the relationship between suggesting services and resources and the student’s engagement or lack thereof. Higher education. student support has been based upon a “build it and they will come” approach, as well as an invitational approach to student referrals. Become a part of the Innovation eco-system Girikon is a certified Salesforce Consulting Partner with extensive Salesforce Consulting experience. Get access to experts who can help you adapt fast and achieve success. Contact us today. Questions? Our reps have answers. CONTACT OUR SALESFORCE CONSULTANTS

Like any other industry, organizations that are a part of the healthcare industry are focused on augmenting health outcomes and driving efficiencies. However, most of them depend on legacy systems that fail to provide a 360-view of the consumers, thereby hindering collaboration and innovation. On the other hand, healthcare consumers have high expectations for personalization and easy access to medical resources. To drive change, healthcare providers adopt robust and innovative solutions that can help them manage various processes in a more secure, seamless, and intuitive way. With an integrated CRM like Salesforce, healthcare processes can be optimized, costs can be minimized, and performance can be enhanced. Compliance systems can be developed, and a secure healthcare environment enabling 360-degree views to connect and engage every stakeholder can be created.  Studies conducted reveal that a significant percentage (about 83%) of healthcare administrations use cloud-powered solutions, while 9.3% aim to do so shortly. Since the release of Salesforce health cloud, healthcare providers can work more efficiently and collaboratively, which not just leads to better patient and provider relationships but also better health outcomes. It makes sense to get in touch with one of the reputed Salesforce consulting partners to know more about it. Let's understand the reasons why healthcare providers should leverage Salesforce: Connect Siloed Systems: Like any other industry, data siloes are created due to disparate systems. Hospitals use multiple disparate systems in the healthcare industry, including EHR, insurance claim systems, billing and marketing details, lab reports, and more. Since this humongous amount of data is scattered across multiple systems, it isn't of much use. A cloud-based CRM like Salesforce can help integrate all the systems so that data can be securely integrated into a single place. This allows healthcare providers to work more efficiently, make informed decisions, and focus more on patient care.  Make Use of Data Intelligently: Salesforce can be leveraged to improve health outcomes. Tools like Tableau provide actionable insights that healthcare providers can use to anticipate and fulfill patients' needs. In other words, Salesforce allows healthcare providers to make data-driven decisions that will lead to greater patient-provider satisfaction and better health outcome.  Augments Collaboration of Care Team: Salesforce health cloud allows healthcare providers to create 'Care Teams' as it is built upon the capabilities of the service cloud. Care teams comprise household caregivers, physicians, specialists, or anyone involved in a patient's healthcare journey. Depending on their positioning in the team, participants can view a care management plan; allocate tasks while sending messages to and from any device. Care teams promote collaboration, which increases productivity, which is a win-win situation for patients and providers. Personalized Experiences: Consumers expect personalized experiences and Salesforce can be leveraged to personalize the healthcare journey of people at every step. By consolidating clinical and non-clinical data in one place, personalized plans can be created. Patient communication can be managed based on patients' preferences through texts, calls, or the Salesforce community’s portal.  Ensure Data Security: One of the major concerns for healthcare companies is data security, as a breach in security can put patient safety at stake. Salesforce allows healthcare organizations to stay in compliance while ensuring data security. Using Salesforce health cloud and Salesforce Shield, electronic protected health information can be encrypted, which is only accessible to authorized users.  Quick Wrap-up:  As the world continues to deal with the pandemic, healthcare providers require operating as efficiently as possible while providing high-quality care. Salesforce Health Cloud aids this in several ways, but it all boils down to one advantage, i.e., providing a 360-degree view of the patient. By enabling intelligent usage of data at various stages of the patient care journey, healthcare companies are empowered to provide the level of service that patients expect. To implement Salesforce health cloud, it is important to get in touch with one of the reliable Salesforce consulting companies.

For a business to sustain in this competitive landscape, the sales and marketing teams must align with each other for ensuring better organizational growth in terms of efficiency, productivity and revenue. However, this is difficult said than done as the goals of sales and marketing teams are misaligned, which encourages them to prioritize their own goals over organizational profits. So, how to deal with this situation? The key lies in having a steady flow of qualified leads that the Sales team can close readily, and this can be made possible by having in place a robust lead scoring system for prioritization of leads. What is the Need for Lead Scoring?  Though, the main priority for marketers is to generate constant flow of sales-ready leads, only a small percentage of the leads generated by the marketing team are considered closable. According to statistics gathered from recent industry research, around 40%-50% of all inbound sales leads aren’t followed up by the salespeople. And even if they do so, a lot of time had already passed by for leads to be converted to customers.  Lead scoring, which is a key aspect of lead management helps marketers make the most of all the leads generated. By providing an objective way of sorting through all visitor interactions and ranking them basis their likelihood to buy the company’s products, lead scoring divulges details about the most sales-ready leads besides providing insight about how and which leads should be nurtured. By helping organizations rank their leads basis several behavioral and demographic factors, marketers can determine and focus on the most potential leads.   Evolution of Lead Scoring Tools and Capabilities:  Having information about which leads to follow up and which to ignore can be more of a speculation than science. Lead scoring provides sales and marketing experts a head start on the lead qualification process, which otherwise is time-consuming. Before the recent developments in technology, lead scoring was conducted manually and included making a detailed research on potential customers, recording their details on a database, and finally scoring them.   Today, Marketers have access to tools and capabilities that can help them rank, manage and nurture leads, so that more leads carry a higher probability for positive sales results. Automated capabilities and processes provide powerful ways to handle lead scoring and nurturing to help get the most from every visit to the website.   CRM assisted Lead Scoring:  Since, the task of manual lead scoring was strenuous and time-consuming, CRM (customer relationship management) systems emerged as the savior by automating and simplifying processes. With a robust CRM in place, businesses were able to gather data regarding every single lead and scoring them basis the selected criteria. While integrating a robust CRM system like Salesforce improved the manual way of scoring leads, it still lacked the efficiency required to quickly score leads basis their quality with sales and marketing teams still spending a lot of time gathering details about leads.   This paved way for another innovation i.e. marketing automation. While marketing automation is doing its bit by analyzing and processing a wide variety of data in an automated way, it doesn’t provide the efficacy to differentiate between visitors who are actually interested in making a purchase and those who are simply visiting the site without any intention of making a purchase. This has left space for a new player that offers a solution to all the lead scoring woes i.e. predictive lead scoring using artificial intelligence.   Predictive Lead Scoring:  A Game Changer  Powered by Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, predictive lead scoring allows businesses to determine the criteria for defining a strong lead, creating models for lead scoring based on the specific needs of your company while adapting themselves in a changing market. The Einstein AI capability of Salesforce provides lead scoring an altogether new approach by streamlining a variety of tasks associated with it. Right from automatically collecting and analyzing CRM data for determining strong leads, creating finely tuned lead scoring models to gathering account insights, using Salesforce Einstein AI for lead scoring will augment the efficiency of sales and marketing teams by saving their time significantly. However, you must get in touch with a reliable Salesforce consulting company for any assistance regarding lead scoring including the creation of appropriate lead scoring formulae.   The Bottom line:  The value of figuring out sales-ready leads is inestimable. However, it isn’t easy to manually analyze humongous data to determine closable leads. A robust lead scoring system will help organizations to align their marketing and sales team while ensure better utilization of resources, improve rate of conversion, and condense sales cycle, which will ultimately translates to increased revenue. This will allow sales and marketing teams to close deals quickly while forge a strong relationship with their customers. As a cloud-powered CRM, Salesforce has become preferred choice of businesses due to the wide array of features, functionalities and components offered by the platform. To make the most of this platform, it’s important to partner with a reliable and experienced Salesforce implementation partner.

A popular term that we constantly hear today in the tech marker is Cloud Computing. Salesforce is one of the technologies that is dominating among all the the cloud computing solutions. In this blog, I ( A Salesforce Consultant) will give a brief introduction of Salesforce and will answer few questions: Why Salesforce? What is Salesforce? What are the services offered by the Salesforce? Why Salesforce? 1.People who are using Salesforce say it’s unique for three major reasons: • Fast: If we talk about the legacy CRM system, it takes year to deploy. But Salesforce provides you a fastest path from Idea to App. You need not to think about the infrastructure but building your app. • Easy: In easy to use category Salesforce is the Boss. You need to spend more time on developing rather than figuring it out. • Effective: The ability of customizing Salesforce to meet your business needs, consumers find it very effective. 2. Salesforce is handy, it is there on cloud, a device and internet connection and your team is good to go. 3. As compared to other CRM’s, Salesforce is easy to integrate. You can integrate Salesforce to your Outlook as well as your accounting software. 4. Salesforce is highly scalable to your growth. 5. Salesforce is for all, even the startups and small businesses can use Salesforce. Salesforce is affordable considering its vast variety of services. What is Salesforce? I hope I have answered the above question well, why should we use Salesforce. Now it’s the time to discuss what is Salesforce? Salesforce.com is a company and Salesforce is a technology. Salesforce.com started as SAAS (Software as a Service) CRM Company. Along with various software solutions, now Salesforce.com provide a platform named Force.com for the developers for building and distributing custom software (PAAS). Salesforce is the technology which works on Multitenant Architecture, that describes multiple users can share the common access to the software instance. On Salesforce platform, software and infrastructure upgrade happen automatically. So your organization need not to worry about managing technology, rather focus on innovation. What are the Services offered by the Salesforce? The importance of Salesforce in Cloud Computing market cannot be understood completely, without knowing about the wide variety of products and services that Salesforce offer. Below are the cloud services that are offered by Salesforce: • Salesforce Sales Cloud • Salesforce Service Cloud • Salesforce Community Cloud • Salesforce Marketing Cloud • Salesforce Commerce Cloud • Salesforce Analytics Cloud • Salesforce App Cloud • Salesforce IOT Cloud I tried to touch the basic technical aspects of Salesforce in this article. We as an organization and Salesforce implementation partner provide Salesforce development services in all the major areas.

Who is a Salesforce Consultant? A Salesforce Consultant is a knowledgeable, experienced person who helps in utilizing your CRM qualities to the fullest which will benefit your business. Finding a suitable Salesforce Consultant who can be fit for your business is never an easy task. You need to have confidence in their Salesforce experience, knowledge, problem-solving abilities.