IHM Business School gets connected with Salesforce

Keeping people connected is key to an efficient and motivated organisation. We talked to Thomas Höstner, Chief Information and Digital Officer at IHM Business School about how smarter collaboration is helping to drive better business outcomes and increase user adoption as it transforms its digital strategy.

Tell us about IHM Business School

The university was founded in 1968, and has three campuses across Sweden in Gothenburg, Stockholm and Malmö. We offer graduate business courses, vocational training and executive education to around 2,500 students every year. We have 80 members of staff, and a community of 250 consultant teachers, so offering a consistent student experience relies on everyone being on the same page.

How does better collaboration help you improve the student experience?

As a geographically diverse organisation, it’s important that we still act with one voice. Salesforce helps us to do that by providing a single source of the truth, not just for customer records, but for conversations that we’ve had with students, staff or teachers. Any member of staff can pick up a conversation without having to ask the student the same questions again. Everyone has access to the same information. This cuts out inefficiencies while driving better conversations with students, and knowing each student means we can give them better support and ultimately, a more enjoyable student experience.

You’ve recently revamped your digital strategy, how did you deal with change management?

Everyone knows that user attitude is the key to a successful transformation, and people are often wary of change. So we got people involved in the implementation from day 1 and ran workshops regarding all our business processes. We also started end user training early in the implementation process so that all our users were familiar and comfortable with the Salesforce platform when we went live. Now we’ve seen a cultural shift, where people are confident and enthusiastic about finding digital solutions based around the Salesforce platform, and will come to us with new ideas for ways of improving processes. Their input will prove key in how we take our digital platform forwards.

How have you taken advantage of the Salesforce App Cloud to extend your digital capabilities?

We actually use more than 12 different apps, which support everything from event management and certificate production to website forms and backup. The App Cloud ecosystem and Salesforce’s ease of integration with other systems bring all our digital processes together in a really straightforward way.

Where do your users collaborate and share ideas?

We have a very active Chatter community – around 90% of employees are using it at the moment, and we have around 15 groups. We use it for everything from arranging social events to discussing business processes and sharing information between departments.

And how do you communicate with wider audience?

All of our teachers are external consultants, so to keep in touch with them, we’ve established a partner community on Community Cloud, known as IHM Business Network. From here, we can find the right teachers for the right courses, and it’s integrated with an event management solution from the App Cloud so it’s easy to invite the appropriate people to events. For students, we’ve created two communities, depending on whether they’re studying for IHM Diploma in Business Administration or, studying for a IHM Diploma in Higher Vocational Education. These communities are linked to Service Cloud, so they can access self-service capabilities directly. So far, we have 2,500 student users, and they really like it. We’re planning to introduce more omni-channel capabilities to the community in the future, and also work with partners to publish and manage internships via the community.

Informed people are confident people. Join us for a live webinar on June 28th to learn more about how IHM Business School is powering efficiency and smarter student services.