Rock Valley College: A Community of Learners Unified by StoreConnect and Salesforce

Rock Valley College is a comprehensive community college in Rockford, Illinois, dedicated to empowering its community through lifelong learning.

They are an institution with a diverse range of programs, from traditional curriculum based courses to continuing education and many others in between. This growing catalogue of courses created a critical challenge; a fragmented, outdated system that created chaos, frustration and significant barriers for its students and staff.

This is the story of how Rock Valley College, in partnership with StoreConnect and Salesforce, went from managing disparate, error-prone systems to creating a single, unified platform that has revolutionized its operations and enhanced the student experience.

The Challenge:

Before StoreConnect, each of Rock Valley College’s five different branches operated in silos. The Community and Continuing Education (CCE) division, in particular, used an enrollment system called “Instant Enrollment.” While designed to be a solution, it was anything but.

The system was inflexible, provided no customization and introduced a seemingly endless stream of operational challenges.

These shortcomings had a direct and often comical-if-it-weren’t-so-serious impact:

- Thousands of duplicates: The system was incapable of recognizing existing student records, leading to a staggering estimate of a thousand duplicate records created per year in their ERP system. A significant portion of staff’s time was consumed by the “nightmarish amount of work” to manually fix these records.

- A century of errors: As students born after 1999 began enrolling, the system couldn’t recognize the birth year. It would automatically register students born in 2004 as being…106 years old, born in 1904!

- Student barriers: The platform was not user-friendly and would often fail during checkout, leaving students frustrated. As a result, the college believed it was losing enrollments from students who simply gave up rather than call for help.

- Zero visibility: The college had no way of knowing how students were registering, whether it was online, over the phone, or in person. David Schneider, Dean of Enrollment Services, recounted a meeting where the question was raised, “How many people are checking out online?” and the answer was, “We have no idea.”

It was during this time, while searching for a modern solution to their problems, that the college received an introduction to StoreConnect from their implementation partner, Servio Consulting. This led to a series of conversations about how a unified platform could solve these deep-rooted issues.

“The whole team knew we needed a new solution,” said David. “The product that was creating all the duplicate records just wasn’t working. We needed something that was user-friendly and would check all the boxes.”

The Solution:

The path began with Salesforce. Rock Valley College had already started implementing the CRM to bring uniformity to its departments. Finding a tool to handle payments and registrations for continuing education was the final piece of the puzzle. Ensuring these registrations seamlessly arrived at their workflows in Salesforce was key.

Finding StoreConnect, they immediately saw the benefit of the deep Salesforce integration.

The CCE team had always wanted an “Amazon shopping cart experience” with photos, descriptions and a smooth checkout, StoreConnect delivered.

The primary goal was simpler: “If we can get the data going through Salesforce, that’s all we’re asking for, because the duplication of records is too much for us to clean up.”

The Benefits

The shift to StoreConnect brought immediate and measurable benefits that have profoundly changed the way Rock Valley College operates:

- Unprecedented data integrity & efficiency: StoreConnect’s direct integration with Salesforce has eliminated the thousands of duplicate records that once plagued the college. Erik Rodgers, their Salesforce CRM Administrator noted that “Before StoreConnect, manually merging records in our ERP was a nightmare amount of work. Now, with StoreConnect, we can simply run through the merge process in Salesforce.”

- The end of student barriers: StoreConnect provides a modern, user-friendly experience that meets students’ expectations. Parents can now easily register multiple children for classes in a single checkout and the visual, “Amazon-like” interface has replaced the old, cumbersome search box.

- Real-time visibility: For the first time, the college has a clear view of its registration data. They now have a baseline to measure from and a new goal: to significantly increase online registrations and reduce the old, manual paper-based processes.

- Empowered staff: By eliminating the reactive work of fixing data errors, staff can now focus on productive, high-value tasks. As David put it, they can now “focus on improvements instead of just trying to tread water.”

The journey to implementation was not without its hurdles. The college’s biggest sticking point was its payment processor, ACI, which was not a standard integration for StoreConnect.

Looking Ahead:

With the biggest changes now behind them, Rock Valley College is already focused on the future. The director of the CCE, Becky Lambert, is so impressed with StoreConnect that she now has plans to bring the Center for Learning and Retirement (CLR) program onto the platform. When that happens, the college will have achieved its ultimate goal of having all student data flowing through one universal system, creating a truly unified experience for every student and every staff member.