Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana boosts operational efficiency and optimizes staff and student experience

Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, the largest singly accredited community college in the United States, uses dozens of software platforms in their technology stack. College leadership knew this could easily become daunting for their students and staff. Recognizing the risk of tech fatigue, user guides, in-person meetings, and support tickets are not ideal methods for enabling student success. This led the College to introduce WalkMe to provide in-system guidance and simplify processes across the board.

Ivy Tech applied digital adoption solutions to seven of its student and staff-facing platforms and quickly saw improved efficiency, a decrease in support tickets, and higher completion rates for complex tasks. By integrating a digital adoption strategy into its IT framework, Ivy Tech has become more agile and data-driven as an organization – and continues to set its students up for a successful higher education career. As Ivy Tech continues to innovate, digital adoption remains a key priority for enhancing user experience and enabling students and staff to focus on what matters most: students’ success.

Their results to date include:

• 50%+ decrease in Health Sciences Application support tickets
• 50% reduction in incorrectly routed student support tickets
• 127,000+ estimated hours saved for users in the last 12 months
• Engaged with 162,000+ users across 7 platforms in the last 12 months

At Ivy Tech Community College, students interact with 40+ software platforms over the course of their academic career, from registering for courses to attending online classes, to submitting support tickets. Students often had difficulty completing mandatory tasks, finding important web pages or documents, and finishing processes without errors – all of which led to frequent contact with support teams. As a large organization with a lean IT department, employees – including faculty, staff and advisors – needed to be empowered to meet the needs of students and perform their own daily tasks efficiently.

“With every system launch or update, I spent an immense amount of time developing user guides,” said Channing Gabe, Digital Adoption Specialist at Ivy Tech. “Ultimately, people didn’t use them, or the technology changed too quickly to keep them relevant.”

Students, faculty, and staff found the school’s registration platform especially challenging to navigate. The biggest pain point was that students experienced issues completing the class registration process, often leaving required courses in the shopping cart. As a result, they had to make appointments with advisors to complete their registration, taking valuable time away from both staff and students.

“Student retention and success drives all strategies and initiatives at our college,” said Christine Ring Grice, Digital Adoption Specialist at Ivy Tech. “We knew we needed to find a way to mitigate any technology fatigue and make the experience of using our systems more seamless and provide self-service tools for our students and staff.”

Ivy Tech leadership set out to find the right platform to drive Ivy Tech’s digital adoption initiative. “From the moment I saw a demo of WalkMe, I knew it would be a game-changer,” Gabe said. “WalkMe would eliminate the need for manuals and in-person training while providing in-system support when users needed it.”

The Ivy Tech digital adoption team focused on improving students’ technology experience by creating in-app guidance on four core student applications: ServiceNow, Salesforce, Canvas LMS, and its registration platform. “We developed just-in-time guidance across critical systems so students could easily locate important, time-sensitive information and take action without waiting for a support team member,” said Ring Grice.

For the registration platform, the team built digital adoption solutions to introduce new students to the site and address the biggest pain point in the platform: incomplete registrations. A ShoutOut notification reminds students to finalize their registration, triggering an automated workflow to finalize their shopping cart, and successfully completing the registration process. Throughout the class selection process, SmartTips help students optimize their schedules by reminding them to add breaks, verify the class location, and ensure they choose the right class type. When students need to request special approval for higher-level courses, a cross-application Shuttle combined with a Launcher directs students to another platform to schedule appointments with their advisors. Lastly, the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) team used automation to ensure students successfully save and submit their class selections.

“Our WalkMe solutions within our registration platform provides more student autonomy and alleviates the load of advisors needing to meet with students in-person to complete registration manually,” said Gabe. “We also use WalkMe Goals to monitor the effectiveness of our solutions and drive future decisions.”

When Ivy Tech launched Salesforce for its Health Sciences student application, the organization saw 3,000 support tickets in the first 12 months. The digital adoption team deployed WalkMe content to address the biggest issues and eliminate unnecessary support requests. Their solutions included ShoutOuts to alert students about missing information that was required to proceed with their applications, SmartTips to proactively inform students of the time needed for pre-requisite course processing, and Shuttles to drive students to knowledge base articles.

For Ivy Tech’s ServiceNow portal, the digital adoption team aimed to reduce the number of students submitting tickets to the wrong help desk queue and to expedite agents’ ability to resolve issues. They deployed an invisible Launcher with a WalkThru to ask students about their support needs and, based on their responses, route student queries to the correct team rather than the general queue. For staff members, the digital adoption team built WalkMe content to help agents understand their agent dashboards, guide them through ticket scenarios, and determine the status of tickets in their queue. Resources in the WalkMe Menu provide quick access to vital knowledge base articles needed to make decisions.

“With automation, we eliminate unnecessary clicks and quickly get students to the support queue they need. WalkMe significantly reduced the number of incorrectly routed tickets, and as a result, we’ve reduced the time it takes to go from question to resolution,” Ring Grice said.

In Canvas LMS, the digital adoption team uses WalkMe solutions to guide students to the correct inbox, so they don’t miss important messages from their faculty, financial aid, or support departments. WalkMe is also used to navigate their Canvas dashboard and locate instructor feedback. When Ivy Tech launched a brand-new virtual proctoring system, the team also built content to help staff and students understand the changes and ensure they didn’t experience any disruptions or confusion in the process.

Because Ivy Tech is a large organization with a lean, agile IT department, it’s vital that every employee is empowered with the technological knowledge they need to self-serve whenever possible. For example, Tableau, which most staff only accessed once per semester, presented a great opportunity for digital adoption. “With our WalkMe solutions, employees can easily customize their reports or dashboards to fit their needs, which decreases the need to request specific reports from the analytics team,” Gabe said. “These efficiencies give employees more time to spend on student success and retention efforts, which is our number-one priority,” Gabe said.

Ivy Tech now uses almost every type of WalkMe content on seven platforms – four of which Gabe developed herself before her team grew to its current size. “We strive to create content that saves time by using cross-application workflows and automation so students can focus on their academics, rather than struggling to navigate all the platforms,” Gabe said. “Using these solutions has created a more streamlined process, eliminated user errors, and improved user engagement.”

By integrating WalkMe and a digital adoption strategy into its IT framework, Ivy Tech has optimized enrollment and administrative processes, boosting efficiency, reducing costs, and most importantly: delivering a competitive advantage with a better staff and student experience. Since implementing WalkMe, the team has seen positive results across the board, including an 85% completion rate of the registration process when users engage with WalkMe. Health Sciences Application-related support tickets decreased by 53% and incorrectly routed support tickets in ServiceNow decreased by 50%. Ivy Tech also estimates its digital adoption solutions have saved their users an estimated 127,000+ hours over the last 12 months.

Providing digital adoption solutions for staff and students helps drive the school’s mission to help students be successful. In-app guidance enables more student autonomy and ensures they get the most out of their time at the school and receive the assistance they need throughout their time on campus, from registering for the right classes to ensuring they receive timely messages. For faculty and staff, digital adoption improves efficiency in their day-to-day tasks, affording them more time to spend on student success and retention.

“Our support team has shared that they love the guidance and find it incredibly helpful. Digital adoption helps our systems work better for them, so they’re empowered to assist our students and staff,” Ring Grice said. “We’re able to build WalkMe solutions that are versatile enough to empower all users, from campus chancellors to behind-the-scenes technical support to access the information they need just in time.”

The school’s tech-savvy approach not only enhances the higher education experience, it also positions the college competitively by attracting students and staff who seek innovative and digitally equipped learning environments. Ivy Tech continues to find new ways to innovate with digital adoption. “Digital adoption enables us to stay agile and responsive to changes at the College, leveraging data-driven insights to work proactively, rather than reactively,” said Gabe. “Digital adoption is the future, and I’m proud to be a part of a college where innovation and adaptation are priorities for enhancing student success.”