Recharging Your Students’ Experience

By: Seonah Iverson, Product Marketing Manager, DocuSign

In today’s higher education landscape, stellar student engagement is key to staying competitive. Institutions who don’t settle for the same old systems and operations are undergoing digital transformations that truly put the student first. These institutions are establishing stronger connections with their students while also finding efficiencies for their faculty and staff.

The first step in enhancing your students’ experience is to really understand their expectations. In the world of consumerization, it’s easy to assume engaging with students across screens and devices is important, but what does that mean for institutions?

97% of U.S. students value technology that supports them outside the classroom equally as much as technology that supports them in the classroom.* A disjointed workflow across technologies used on and off campus is not just less than ideal – it’s unacceptable to many students. 87% of those same students stated that the tech-savviness of a college is a crucial component when selecting schools to apply to.

Taking the time to assess and unpack all your students’ frustrations of existing systems and processes will uncover legacy processes that are likely manual, time-consuming, and create data silos. The next step is identifying integrated solutions that will create a seamless workflow for students and faculty. This can be achieved by researching technologies that will work well with existing systems to ensure you get the most out of your investments.

The most valuable system designs keep all transactions and student data digital and eliminates redundant requests. A key priority when considering that 93% of students expect they should have to provide their personal information only once to their institution. Centralizing processes and data collection helps meet these student expectations while also winning time back so faculty and staff can spend less time on paperwork and more time adding value for students.

Lastly, one of the most compelling student expectations is their emotional connection to their institution – or lack thereof. 94% of students value digital networks across their fellow students and with faculty members to feel more emotionally connected to their college. Building a strong connection with students can be real benefit of building an integrated system. Not only will students have a more positive experience completing forms and engaging with different departments, but they will also feel a strong kinship to the faculty and institution at large.

Making the move from manual to digital has made a huge impact for our higher education customers. By integrating core systems to make processing student paperwork more efficient and reliable, we’ve helped institutions reduce completion time for forms by 50% after digitizing admissions processes. Faculty teams we’ve worked with have also received feedback from students on how easy the admissions process was after using DocuSign – some students even mentioned it was fun!

DocuSign for Salesforce helps higher education institutions better understand and anticipate their students’ expectations and eliminate legacy systems. We help automate processes across student services and all administrative workflows so faculty and staff can spend less time with paperwork and more time connecting and adding value to students.

Learn more about solutions for higher education.

*Source: 2017 Study – Students are Looking for Personalized Digital Experiences. Does Higher Ed Deliver? By Ellucian