The University of Alabama at Birmingham connects confidently with prospective students thanks to AddressTools

“Our returned mail has decreased by over half since using AddressTools.”

Evan Thrailkill, Director of Digital Strategy at University of Alabama at Birmingham

AddressTools empowers students to be their own data heroes. Students verify addresses themselves, taking the burden off UAB staff and Salesforce admins.

The challenge: connecting seamlessly with self-registered prospective students

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) was named the number one Best Large Employer for 2021 by Forbes this past February, and the university had over 22K students enrolled for the fall 2020 semester.

UAB faced major communication challenges:

• Students could input bad data on their enrolment applications.
• UAB couldn’t trust that important mail correspondence would reach prospective students.
• Pre-Salesforce, their tools had slow loading times causing students to abandon their applications.
• UAB missed out on vital opportunities for connecting with potential students.

Harnessing the power of the Salesforce ecosystem with ProvenWorks and Cloud For Good

After partnering with Cloud for Good, UAB established a centralized and standardized environment for enrolment management on the Salesforce platform.

Students self-register for an account in their online application portal and provide contact details for all future correspondence. UAB use AddressTools at the beginning of the student self-registration process.

The solution: empowering students to be their own data heroes

Users begin typing their address and suggestions begin to show, filtering further as the search expands. All search results are already verified using global authority data, such as USPS and other global-local postal authorities for international students.

For undergraduate applications, UAB verify student addresses when they hit Salesforce from their Banner (SIS) integration. This helps ensure UAB has an accurate USPS address for all of their post-admissions communications, decision letters and next steps to enrolment.

The results: an improved experience for students and staff

AddressTools makes it almost impossible for students to enter bad address data. The end result is that all address data is checked and verified at the point of entry.

An enhanced applicant experience

• Students receive vital postal communication from UAB.
• Faster loading time and application time thanks to the power of the Salesforce Community platform.
• Fewer dropouts mid application.
• Students experience the UAB connected and trustworthy journey right from the moment they register!

An improved UAB user experience

• UAB staff save extensive administrative time, no longer needing to correct bad data.
• UAB staff can trust their data and their CRM processes.
• Saved costs on expensive delivery failures and resending decision letters.