Arc @ UNSW Student Clubs
Arc is a not-for-profit that encompasses everything about student life at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). The organisation is run by students, for students, signs up more than 30,000 members annually and helps administer 300 clubs along with all associated events and volunteers.
The Challenge
Arc’s member registration process was very inefficient, that relied on outdated, isolated legacy systems and increasingly complex spreadsheets. The inefficiencies of the system made it impossible for Arc to get a clear view of members and their interests, indeed, the inability to build accurate profiles of each member meant that at times it could be hard to tell the difference between two people with the same name. Additionally, the legacy system was quite labour intensive with duplicates and mistakes leading to high staff costs and long wait times for members. Finally, Arc was working on a tight time frame in order to get the new system up and running before the busiest time of the year – Orientation Week.
The Solution
DataColada has been guiding Arc’s Salesforce adoption with their proven Four Phases of Business Transformation approach. This project has focused on the Platform Phase, firmly establishing a single view of the customer and delivering internal process automation. Arc is now moving into the Personalisation Phase which will include building out individual profiles and analysing member information. The goal is to increase member engagement and participation through personalised one to one communications. Next Arc and DataColada will begin the Business Model Innovation Phase which will look at ways to digitise more of Arc’s services. Then the final phase, Prediction, will enable Arc to use the insights gained along the way to stay one step ahead of its members and use machine learning in Salesforce to give them what they want next.
The Benefits
Administration cost and time has been reduced at an exceptionally busy time of the year allowing staff to better spend time face to face with members to deliver more personal member experiences and personalised engagement across multiple facets of student life. Importantly from the member perspective registration is seemingly a simpler, shorter, self-service process through the community portal.
Results from OWeek (Feb 2019)
- 17,000 members registered during a 1 week period
- 90% fewer mistakes and duplicate entries
- Longest wait time decreased 56%
- Average transaction time dropped from 3.5 minutes to 1.5 minutes
- Completed O-Week with 40% less budget than the prior year
