Strategies for Customer Acquisition and Retention: Insights from College of Law

THE BRIEF

Customer acquisition and retention through experience-led strategies.

Keeping your lead in Australasia’s legal education sector means rising to challenges before anyone else even knows they exist. Pro-actions over reactions. College of Law was out to empower its marketing team, roll out retention strategies, and establish a pioneering student learning experience. Yes, all at once. Embarking on three major initiatives simultaneously unlocked a case of analysis paralysis.

This is the best experience I’ve ever had working with a technology company. You guys actually help me to achieve the objectives.

Irene Chung

Marketing Director, College of Law

College of Law

An educational institution fostering law, order & bright futures.

Since 1974, College of Law has provided practical legal training to those wanting to take the law into their own hands, so to speak.

Masters degrees, professional development, various other certifications. The majority of lawyers in Australia and New Zealand (and many in the UK and Asia) have walked through the college’s doors at some point.

The story so far.

It turned out, the three key objectives were more interdependent than the College originally thought. Sudo Roux took a holistic approach, setting out to deliver the entire vision through one lens. We got the separate departments – marketing, IT, operations and finance – onto the same page. Only at this point could initiatives get aligned and could the College move forward. We delivered the baseline capability that opened the client’s eyes to just how quickly they could progress.

Now, we were ready to start rolling out the whole-of-business transformation.

98%
of all future legal practitioners in Australia study at the College
1st
Subscription based product in APAC in its vertical

Out with the old. In with the reinvention.

Whenever we look under the hood of Fortune 500 businesses and large enterprises, we always find something slowing the engine. College of Law followed suit. We pulled out a legacy application that, while mission-critical for operations, was so old and badly-maintained that it was a drag on the otherwise forward-thinking organisation. Plus, old-school platforms and processes were prioritising the needs of the College over the student experience.

How do you transform while keeping the lights on? The key is to put levels of abstraction around legacy systems, and let them form a subset of functions while newer technology is implemented.

Matt Sayer

Chief Technology Officer, Sudo Roux

Toolbox

Beyond baseline capabilities.

Canvas

Learning management

Salesforce EDA

Student management

Optimizely

Content management, digital experience, product recommendations

Great Plains

Finance systems

Snowflake

Identity management, data warehousing, business intelligence & reporting

Mulesoft

Integration

Writing the script around audience cues.

All rise for the customer experience. CX has been the main driver behind successful organisations for the past 15 years or so. College of Law’s student management system needed to pivot to respond to what the students wanted. We spent three years unwrapping the features that had been embedded in cotton wool. The mission was to deliver better experiences by making it easier for students to sign up and navigate their dedicated portal. We also made sure students were provided the utility of only having one place to go with a dedicated learner portal.

First in, last out.

The introduction of new products and processes served the CX while feeding into our client’s acquisition and retention goals. While many respected tertiary education providers use Canvas as their learning management system (LMS), College of Law became the first to offer a subscription-based higher education product. Shaping learnings as products lets the college expand their offering through repeatable structures, messaging frameworks and delivery types. With 4-5 key products already out in the world, we’ll work on delivering more over the next 12 months.

LEGO-inspired design frameworks.

With our sights on a new website in the next year or so, we created a repeatable, scalable design framework. A LEGO-style building block architecture lets us run a parallel replatforming of the College’s current website. Streamlined migration. Speedy build. Scalable across all territories.

We’ve set the College up with the tools to make their own changes on-the-go without compromising consistency of delivery.

Future-focused.

The future’s always just around the corner, and the holistic transformation of College of Law is in full flow. The business process is blueprinted. Operations are streamlined. Technical capabilities are realised. And we’ve consolidated and aligned priorities with the board’s strategic goals.

We’ve got high hopes for the application of eCommerce to provide a unique, transactional backbone for the productised delivery of learning. The growth here is set to come by assigning a value to every interaction — download information, find out more, make a purchase, ‘Buy Now Pay Later’. This reporting process is underpinned by eCommerce transaction software for scalability across markets, territories, languages, currencies, taxations.