CSUSM prioritizes the student lifecycle journey with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Pioneering social mobility through personalized engagement and tech innovation

Nestled in the foothills of northern San Diego County, California State University San Marcos (CSUSM) stands out among its 22 sister CSU campuses for its impressive growth in enrollment, particularly at a time when many institutions nationwide are grappling with declining numbers. CSUSM focuses on improving access to higher education, recognizing it to be a crucial driver of upward social mobility, while providing academic support and fostering career development, promoting diversity and inclusion, and engaging with the community.  

CSUSM has made it a priority to support first-generation students and aims to offer them a personalized, responsive experience throughout their academic journey, from recruitment to graduation and beyond. “The beacon is about achieving social mobility,” says Dr. Ellen Neufeldt, President of CSUSM. “We are 34 years young with 16,000 students, and San Marcos is about making sure people who have not typically been afforded entry to higher education not only have the opportunity, but also have the means to successfully complete their educational journey.”

The university understood that continued enrollment growth and commitment to social mobility required strategic thinking. Equally important were tech-forward processes for its personalized student plan to achieve its potential. It sought to empower its entire staff to efficiently create and deliver compelling communications, both digitally and in person, without relying on hard-to-scale manual processes. This required a transformation of the school’s systems, which were previously fragmented and siloed. Along with that came the need to eliminate tools that required specialized expertise. 

Using technology for a student-centered approach

CSUSM wants to personalize its engagement with students. Traditionally, students interact with different services in isolation, with their information scattered across different systems. CSUSM’s vision is to provide personalized support and services to its students—to communicate and interact with just the right information based on where each individual is on their student lifecycle, helping to facilitate their care, retention, and success. To do that, CSUSM needed a customer (in this case, a student) engagement system to help the school deliver truly personalized, responsive, and connected communications to every San Marcos student, no matter where they are in their college journey.

 “Universities can be complicated for any student, but it can be especially challenging for our first-generation students,” says Tony C. Chung, Chief Information Officer at California State University San Marcos. “It’s important for us to know where each of our students are in their lifecycle journeys and engage with them where they are in their preferred channels. To do that proactively and at scale, we needed technologies that are flexible and can grow with the university."

To manage previously siloed and isolated systems, CSUSM looked to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as an opportunity to centralize data while having insight into student engagement. “With Customer Insights, we have the ability to personalize at scale,” explains Chung. The university wanted the ability to track and personalize its engagements with students, from recruitment through graduation.

Within Customer Insights are “journeys,” multi-part communication schemes that are tailored to each student and react to their interactions and preferences. This personalization improves engagement across the whole lifecycle, from high school as prospectives to successful students, even to alumni making a difference in the community. For example, the university held an event for prospective students and used Customer Insights for a multi-step, personalized communication journey. Once individuals clicked to register for the event, Customer Insights automatically tracked who had signed up and who hadn’t. Those who registered received an immediate email that thanked them and included a QR code for check-in and event information. Subsequently, they were placed on an automated journey with follow-up emails leading up to the event day. All communication was seamlessly managed through Customer Insights without the need for manual intervention.

 “The event team anticipated the usual long lines and long check-in times, and staffed accordingly, but they were surprised at how quickly the crowd thinned out because everyone went through so fast,” says Dr. Tasos Lazarides, Director of Digital Transformation at California State University San Marcos. More than 500 prospective students and their families checked in within the first 40 minutes. “For the first time, there was no line. We knew immediately—in real time—who attended. It was all automated and the team could focus on ensuring our prospective students enjoyed learning about our campus rather than on logistics.” And since CSUSM is using Customer Insights for the whole student lifecycle, all the lessons learned from the interactions with the prospective students and their families will inform the university’s future communications and engagements.

Going forward, CSUSM will use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to manage all event and campus communications, student tour scheduling, and follow-up correspondence after the event. In addition, to ensure a unified university voice, the president enabled the use of Customer Insights for all communications, including her own. This creates a consistent message and voice across the CSUSM campus and beyond, fostering a sense of continuity and connection.

Transforming student engagement through unified communications and AI-powered personalization

CSUSM’s unified communications voice is currently active in scores of student journeys, and that number of journeys is steadily increasing. To date, the university has created more than 1,700 personalized journeys and sent more than 10 million emails since implementation, making Customer Insights the primary recruitment and engagement communication tool for the university.  

For CSUSM, data is critical to delivering the right information to the right students at the right time to help them be successful. ”What the university can do with Dynamics 365 and the power of AI is curate and centralize data. We are bringing meaning to data chaos,” says Chung. CSUSM is transforming its approach to data integration and communication using Microsoft cutting-edge technology, resulting in a truly personalized student journey. For example, it is reducing communications to prioritize more important ones to assure key messages are received and read. 

The school’s marketing and communications teams are also actively testing Copilot for Dynamics 365 in Customer Insights, which acts as an AI assistant in real time. This includes using natural language to empower staff to more precisely target the right audiences and segments without needing to understand the overall data structure. With Copilot, they will quickly create content in the right tone and build journeys easily using natural language prompts.   

With staff coming from a variety of backgrounds ranging from trained marketers to academics to students, CSUSM is using Copilot to better democratize data-driven engagement with all students, parents, and the broader community without the need for staff to become technology experts. “Copilot has the potential to help CSUSM create a unified and consistent university voice while also embracing AI-driven content creation," says Lazarides. “Scaling personalization is a challenge for all higher education institutes, and Copilot can help CSUSM overcome it by providing staff with timely data insights and AI-driven automated processes.”

Already ranked number one nationally in social mobility, and leading enrollment growth among all CSU schools, CSUSM has used Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Copilot to analyze previously fragmented, siloed data to better understand and personalize the student lifecycle journey. By taking advantage of Dynamics 365 as a platform, CSUSM is streamlining processes and standardizing data while personalizing the experiences of students, faculty, alumni, and the community.

“Dynamics 365 doesn’t replace the good work of our dedicated faculty and our staff; instead it complements their efforts by giving them tools to help engage and support our students right where they are,“ says Dr. Neufeldt. “At CSUSM, we are about transforming what higher education is to best serve the students of today.”

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