Last week, we covered the most game-changing enhancements we made to CSM to help institutions deliver positive employment outcomes. This week, we’ll dive into this year’s efforts to improve client experience and bring our clients together to share best practices and grow our network.
This year, we’ve significantly ramped up our training efforts and given clients more forums to learn from each other. We started the year venturing to Penn State University for our first-ever Student Success Summit in March 2018. We were joined by Kutztown University, Edinboro University, Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) and many other schools in the tri-state area to discuss best practices, successful outreach, and current challenges. We even live streamed the event and had over 100 viewers.
Our annual CSM Symposium in New Orleans, LA was another great opportunity to bring our clients together to hear about the product roadmap and learn skills to foster student success. Every year, CSM users from all types of institutions gather to deepen their knowledge of CSM and share best practices. This year, we were joined by 150+ representatives from across the globe including Georgia Tech, Illinois State University, East London University, and our first Brazilian client, Cruzeiro Do Sol University. The two-day event offered a mix of training and client presentations followed by a wrap-up party at Pat O’Briens in Bourbon Street. For the keynote address, we also had the pleasure to bring in Jeff Selingo, award-winning columnist and best-selling author of “There is Life After College.” His presentation was the highlight of the event and gave career staff objectives for why they should push for more strategic employability initiatives.
“We really need as institutions to start treating career services as the next big student amenity. We need to treat it like we do student success and retention efforts and spend the amount of money and effort on it that we've done on student retention over the last couple of years.”
Jeff Selingo,
New York Times Best-Selling Author of There is Life After College
We also created more virtual and in-person opportunities for clients to learn about the roadmap and each other. Over the summer, we launched the CSM Summer Innovation Webinar Series where the Product team walked clients through the most ground-breaking enhancements of the year, such as Curated Jobs and the new mobile app. To further support this effort, we embarked on a training roadshow this fall across select cities in the United States. Our clients received hands-on training and participated in group workshops where they developed career plans in CSM for their students using the new Pathways feature. Through the year, we also hosted the CSM Best Practice Webinar series. Institutions including UT Austin, Florida Gulf Coast University, Central Washington University among others presented on how they’ve optimized a certain area in CSM and offered their tips and recommendations for other clients to replicate.
Perhaps the most significant effort in client experience this year was the launch of the new Symplicity Help Center in October 2018. We’ve made a significant investment in client success over the past two years in an effort to ensure our clients have the best possible experience with our products. This is yet another example that we’re not only committed to bettering our products, but we’re also invested in improving our client relationships.
The Symplicity Help Center is the brand-new knowledge and resource center for Symplicity clients. The new Help Center will host all support articles, release notes and recorded webinars relating to their system functionality. As part of the rollout plan, we will be unveiling a new ticketing system in the Symplicity Help Center in 2019. However, at this point in time, we will continue to use Client Neighborhood for support tickets, calendar, and forum.
“The new Symplicity Help Center is not only about providing clients access to learning materials, best practices, tutorials. It’s part of our overall strategy to make our products as user friendly as possible. We want to provide the best knowledge center for our clients and are committed to continue to enhance the usability of our platforms.”
Jacob Harper,
Manager of Client Support Services
Stay tuned next week for the last blog post in the series where we'll be sharing how Symplicity continues to expand internationally through new acquisitions, product launches, and strategic partnerships.
