University of Surrey adopts a data-driven approach to improving student satisfaction, powered by Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365

”There was a growing sense that the University was simply behind the times when it came to providing core elements of student support and experience, and in facilitating how we worked with each other, and for our students,” Nick shared. “Our challenges were complex and had evolved over years. It was obvious that solving them would take our academic and professional leadership working together, and be equal parts people, process, and technology. Having the obvious call to action around the experience of our students was in many ways a blessing – we all wanted to come together to solve these issues, and everyone knew that digital had to be a core part of the solution!”

The University mobilised around these challenges, commencing a refresh of its strategy, and aligning the organisation around an “85 Plan” – an ambitious plan to turn around student satisfaction and return to a level that would guarantee a top quartile placement and the experience they wanted for their students. This plan was led by the new Pro-Vice Chancellor Education, Prof. Osama Khan (now Pro-Vice Chancellor, Academic) and Lucy Evans, Chief Student Officer, who partnered closely with Nick and his team. With only six months to make a difference before the next NSS survey, they got to work on a portfolio of student experience improvements, underpinned by the fastest delivery of technology solutions the University had seen. Having a strong investment in Microsoft technology made this significantly easier.
 

“The IT team and my predecessors had worked hard to build our stable of Microsoft tools over the years prior to 2020,” Nick notes. While many universities and companies found the transition to working online difficult, Surrey did not. “We were used to using Teams and Microsoft collaboration technology, and that made our transition to running the University online simpler, leaving us to focus on the things that mattered – how to make sure that the teaching and learning experience was as good as it could be. We had Team sites setup for almost everything, people were chatting, and we switched to video essentially overnight. When it came to getting the tech right, we were 95% done in a week!"

 

A more dynamic perspective on service

 

After that quick turnaround, the challenge was figuring what came next. The team was concerned that they lacked basic telemetry about so many of the services in the University. Only a few services, like IT, had case management/ticketing systems in place and IT alone surveyed customers on how happy they were with services received.

Nick knew they needed to put systems into place to fix this but doing so posed a challenge. For an organisation the size of the University of Surrey, systems and process transformation of any kind can be difficult, slow, and expensive. “We can’t afford to waste money in Higher Education, and anything we save on systems implementation can go straight into our core mission, research and teaching, so we knew we wanted to change, but we also needed to move fast, and without wasting money.”

This was a huge part of what appealed to Nick about digging deeper into what Microsoft technologies could do for the University. For him, the calculation was simple: “Talking to peers in different Universities it was clear that many of us are struggling with the same types of challenges, and very few of us have enough money to buy ‘best of breed’ solutions for every challenge that we’re dealing with. Working with technology from a provider that we had an existing relationship with, existing skills in deploying, and that has solutions spanning the lifecycle of what we do in a University – and which get better the more you use them – that really felt like an obvious answer.”

After consultation with his team and peers, he decided to explore how Microsoft Dynamics 365 could provide the telemetry they were missing. Dynamics 365 turned out to be an ideal solution. It offered a wide range of functionality, for a cost that was already part of the University’s licensing, and more importantly did so with baked-in integration into the rest of the Microsoft stack. Nick explains: “10 years ago I might have gone and bought an off the shelf ticket management system, which would have given me a beautiful point solution to my problem. But, fundamentally, I would have missed some of the most powerful aspects that we’re seeing now – connecting the data and processes easily and cheaply into the rest of what is fast becoming a digitally connected business.”

The results were clear, compelling, and constructive: “We are in a position now where everyone in the University can see how our services are delivering – what volumes look like, where we are delivering services that our customers love, and where we’re not doing as well. This isn’t new ground if you've worked outside of the higher education sector, but so many of us in higher education have struggled to do it, and to do it without breaking the bank. Now instead of finding out that we've dropped 20% in our customer satisfaction 12 months after the trend has started, we're seeing in real time how it's trending, and that means we can do something about it before it becomes a major problem. It's driving powerful real-time conversations at all levels, from budget to shoring up support with more people as needed.”

“The amazing thing is that the effort and the cost has been neither significant nor proportional to the degree of the challenge itself.” Nick expounds: “I had no idea how little outlay I would need to make to be able to do this stuff. I just assumed that not being in one of the largest organisations in the country, I had to set my expectations much lower. And instead, within 12 months – it really is only 12 months that we've been doing this – we've just turned it around from making decision based on good intentions and guesswork, into data driven, real-time decisions.”

 

A culture of innovation, a culture of service

 

The new system allows Nick and team to generate the telemetry to be able to prioritize the big things that are going to impact a lot of people, rather than, in Nick’s words, “knee jerk around the things that are highly emotive.” For example, the University’s Planning and Performance team immediately took advantage of the new data to build out a PowerBI dashboard which incorporated key metrics on all of the University’s Strategy targets, including a detailed view on service performance. “The remarkable thing to me was how fast we went from having next to no reporting in this area, and no skills in PowerBI, to having a full strategic dashboard, with real time service data,” Nick explains. “We provided them with access to the data, and by the time I’d looked back they’d built out something better than the University had ever seen.”

The ticketing systems Nick and team have built up, and the telemetry available through Dynamics allows them to see where to add resources, where they are suffering and how to improve processes. They can now see when a particular team might be over-resourced, and when one is under-resourced and in need of additional support. As a result, overall efficiency improves. And at 20,000 cases a month, a touch of efficiency per case adds up to considerable time savings.

Of course, it’s always about more than just technology. The systems Nick and team put in place also have influenced how people and processes operate across the University of Surrey. Teams know if they’re falling behind the average, or if they’re providing exceptional service to students in real-time, giving them the agility to move quickly. As a result, there’s a healthier sense of competition, of striving to improve the student experience across departments and better serve the needs of the student body. As Nick notes, somewhat jokingly, “No one wants their department sitting near last place”.

Now that enhanced telemetry is in place, Surrey has been able to cultivate a larger culture of accountability, because they have the information they need in real time. This has changed how both the University administration and the Executive Board thinks about management. Nick explains, “I almost can't talk enough about the cultural changes driven at the board level, and in the different teams. When you start measuring something, you're telling people it's important. When we started measuring customer satisfaction and having conversations about it, people started paying more attention to it, and it naturally went up.”

In many ways, these investments in time and resources have radically improved the experience of students at Surrey. The results have been swift and significant, and Nick and his team continue to look for ways to improve and evolve student services. They plan on building out the ecosystem, taking advantage of Power Platform to add chatbots and simplify workflows, and more. That deep dive into Microsoft technologies has, in effect, enabled transformation at scale at the University of Surrey.

“This has just fundamentally changed the conversation for us” Nick says “and that's a really hard thing to do in any university.”