Shorelight
Shorelight works with universities across the U.S. to create innovative programs that deliver comprehensive educational services to international students. Their platform connects international students, universities, and service providers to drive student enrollment and performance at scale.
“Shaun and his team were amazing to work with, and their findings and recommendations are already having an impact on Shorelight at the highest levels; we are actively changing our corporate strategy based on their work.”
The Challenge
Since its founding in 2013, Shorelight relied on a differentiated student experience—one that supports students from application to graduation—along with agency partnerships throughout the world to drive impressive company growth. Yet, growth was slowing. Shorelight collaborated with us to look both inside and outside the organization to scale student and agency partner engagement and remove blockers to revenue growth.
Our Approach
We took a service design approach to map the student experience, employee workflows, technical systems, and business performance metrics to get a comprehensive understanding of growth blockers. We also synthesized existing qualitative research into personas and customer journey maps. Among other things, this work revealed that Shorelight’s existing service model satisfied only one of three possible customer segments. Moreover, internal workflows and systems had grown with such speed that they were complex, contained multiple hand-offs, and were measured in a way that failed to deliver the desired student experience.
Role
Strategist
Service Designer
Key Deliverables
Strategic Recommendations
Personas
Customer Journeys
Service Blueprints
An overview map showing which aspects of the business our deliverables addressed and how they related to the overall strategy. Because we delivered multiple artifacts that communicated aspects of our strategic recommendations, this visual guide helped orient everyone around how they all fit together.
A journeyman for one of the three customer segments we identified. Each of the segments had a different consideration period, which required different marketing outreach to effectively engage that segment. The highlighted area differed for each segment, allowing executives to easily see during their strategic retreat how—and why—each of these journeys differed (what our client called “passing the squint test”).
Synthesizing research data into customer journeys.
Outcomes
Student journeys enabled Shorelight to attract and convert new kinds of students, expanding the pool of potential customers. We identified a variety of marketing initiatives aligned with key moments in the journey—such as online to offline webinars—to increase engagement and conversion. We also recommended the adoption of journey management and an end-to-end concierge service model to eliminate hand-offs across functional teams and reduce points of friction that negatively affected engagement and retention. In response, Shorelight merged Inside Sales and Admission and Enrollment Services to deliver a cohesive student experience from application through enrollment and to measure team performance using journey-based experience metrics.