Barcelona Study Abroad Experience (SAE) is a boutique study abroad and internship program with an exclusive focus on the city of Barcelona, Spain. All aspects of our programs incorporate experiential learning and cultural immersion in order to open the eyes of the next generation of leaders to a global world. Barcelona SAE provides the opportunities for students to grow personally, academically and globally utilizing the city of Barcelona and its components as the classroom.
The Challenge
Barcelona SAE recently decided it needed to improve its outdated and decentralized student application process. In particular, Barcelona SAE identified three key challenges:
Specifically, Barcelona SAE had always relied on a very manual process for its entire student application process from the student user side and the team at Barcelona SAE. The student application process was built using many different tools, including Google docs, PayPal, email, and gravity forms that didn’t send data to a centralized location. This unconnected process made for a frustrating experience for the students as they never quite understood where they were in the application process and had to go through many different steps to communicate with the team at Barcelona SAE.
Also, the team at Barcelona SAE had to continually work with disconnected products that forced the team to enter information manually multiple times across various solutions. This outdated process made reporting almost nonexistent, and there was no centralized area for the staff to go and see where individual students were in the application process. This led to lots of time tracking down data and information between team members.
The Solution
Based on its challenges and need for improvement, Barcelona SAE knew it needed to update its software and processes. Barcelona SAE already had Salesforce, but it was not being utilized by the team and it did not align with their business needs. The company decided to partner with AllCloud, a Platinum Salesforce Partner, to lead its implementation. AllCloud previously worked with Barcelona SAE’s sister company to implement a similar process.
Since AllCloud already had some experience with the student application process, AllCloud began the partnership with an upfront discovery, taking the time to understand Barcelona SAE’s business, including the challenges with its current state and its goals for the future. During this discovery phase, AllCloud discovered that the way Salesforce was configured did not meet the business needs or processes at the time. The team at Barcelona SAE was only using about 10% of what Salesforce could offer.
Ultimately, AllCloud helped Barcelona SAE implement a Salesforce solution covering:
The Result
With the initial Salesforce implementation, Barcelona SAE has seen dramatic improvements in the student application process for both the student users and the Barcelona SAE staff.
The Barcelona SAE team can now see where each application is and create processes for touchpoints based on that. The staff now has a central location for all the information in the student application process, including processing payments, application submission on the website that is integrated with Salesforce via FormStack, and contact information before and throughout the student internship. Also, communication with students and status updates on the application are now automated, eliminating the manual workloads that the staff was facing.
With the improved and connected process, the staff now has access to more advanced reporting and KPIs to track the application process more effectively. The AllCloud team also provided Salesforce training for staff members, so Barcelona SAE can now have a Salesforce Administrator on staff continue to improve their operations.
The student experience has also greatly improved. The student experience is now automated through the entire application process, and the students now have a clear understanding of the status of their application. In addition, students now have access to a new portal that stores all their information and documents. Plus, the online portal will provide them with updates throughout the process.
These new processes have improved the user experiences for both the internal Barcelona SAE team and the students. Once the current pandemic allows for international internships and travel continue, Barcelona SAE is looking forward to the continued improvement of its student application process.