Nicole Fishers, Deputy Chief Information Officer at Flinders University, and Dell’s Chief Privacy Officer, Sooji Seo, were among the speakers on the Future of the Connected Workforce panel at Boomi World, discussing the favourable impact a robust application and data integration solution has on customer and employee experience.
Flinders University is a higher education institution with over 25,000 students and, as Fishers explains, the need for a reliable technology solution to connect students to the information they need in real-time is critical.
“What we are embarking on at the moment is providing a connected experience and also a personalised experience, and to do that data is everything,” Fisher said.
“Being able to take that data and use AI and analytics to understand our students and how successful they are or when they are at risk of failing or dropping out of university depend on predictive analytics and then being able to provide feedback to those students. It’s not just in a timely fashion but to also support their success in a personalised way that supports that individual student,” Fishers said.
“And then on the other side with the chatbots, it is about being able to free up administrative and student support staff to add value. So using things like chatbots for transactional or consistent types of questions particularly around enrolment time when you get a lot of similar questions from students we can free up our staff to provide higher value services to those students.”
Offering feedback on the tech, Fishers said it is seamless as the students do not know what is happening behind scenes of the services they use. But students are like any customer paying for a service, she noted, and with many higher education choices available to them their expectations are high.
Therefore the rollout of customer-friendly interfaces and interactions is no longer a “nice to have” option but a requirement for Flinders University to compete on the global stage.
“I think a lot of the time the students do not know it is happening. Higher education is going through an unprecedented change in its 1000-year history. We are globally competing. Student expectations are extremely high, and they are very much a customer shopping for a choice.
“They are looking like a consumer, and they are looking for consumer type things in a university that they would look for in their normal day to day world,” she said.
Similarly, fellow panellist Sooji Seo, Chief Privacy Officer at Dell, describes the benefits from leveraging technology like chatbots and AI to respond to privacy-related enquiries from customers and team members in real-time.
Seo said Dell’s privacy office gets a lot of general retained private enquires. Despite her team’s small size, Seo said using technology they can deliver a response 24/7 worldwide.
Explaining the importance of real-time around-the-clock service, Seo said “You will see more and more customers and millennials that will be differentiating who they work for and who they want to do business with by selecting a company that is forward thinking.”
With Dell’s 160,000 plus employees, Seo said she sees her role as twofold. First, to be a trusted strategic adviser to the business to enable it to achieve their strategic priorities. Seo said this means to be “a data protection advocate for our customers and our team members so when they share their data with us, they know what use that data is for” and it will be used “for the good of humankind, and not for something we have heard in headline news.”
Second, Seo said her role also involves taking all the data points for hiring and retaining staff in ways that engage employees and is proactive in how Dell delivers that service to team members.
“At Dell, we have tools to give real-time recognition to team members, so that the team members who are with us that we want to retain are retained,” she said.
“For team members who want to join Dell, we can use data in a good way so that they can get information to grow and thrive. They can get access, if they have a career aspiration, to the learning studio data right then and there in the comfort of their own living room so that they can grow and excel in their chosen career,” Seo said.
About the author
Melina Gouveia is a freelance writer and contributor to the Which-50 Digital Intelligence Unit of which Dell Boomi is a corporate member. Our members provide their insights and expertise for the benefit of the Which-50 community. Membership fees apply.