Transforming Student Support at King’s

University life is complex. It’s a time of personal growth, academic challenges, and navigating entirely new environments. At King’s College London, we’ve recognised that supporting students goes well beyond lectures and exams—it’s about creating an infrastructure that helps them manage all the other parts of their lives too, from administrative tasks to emotional well-being.

This transformation isn’t just about providing services; it’s about rethinking how those services are delivered. At the heart of this change is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, and powered by the recently formed Digital Innovation for Student Success (DISS) product team. (A key distinction here is that the DISS team develops the product, while a range of student services across the university use it to manage cases, deliver support, and ensure that students have the resources they need, when they need them.)

A Team Built for Transformation

The DISS product team brings together experts in AI, automation, user experience (UX), data insights, and digital product development. This team is not only building tech solutions but is leading a shift from project-based approaches to a more long-term, product-focused mindset. The goal? To ensure that the systems we create aren’t just effective today but can evolve alongside student needs.

Every time a student reaches out or interacts with us, it triggers a web of support that’s carefully tracked, managed, and resolved through the tools developed by the DISS team.

To date, services on CRM have resolved 166,000 cases through the system. But this number only tells part of the story. Each case can involve multiple forms of engagement—whether that’s a series of emails, in-person meetings, phone calls, or notes shared among staff. The level of activity and correspondence around each case is a significant multiple of that headline figure. Every time a student reaches out or interacts with us, it triggers a web of support that’s carefully tracked, managed, and resolved through the tools developed by the DISS team.

2023/24 has been a record year for us: first-response SLA compliance (how quickly we respond to a student’s initial query) hit 84%, and for our most mature team—handling 80% of all cases—that figure jumps to 94%. On the resolution side, we’re just as strong, with 80% compliance overall, and 91% for the most experienced team. This means that, in most cases, students get prompt responses and solutions, ensuring they’re not left waiting for help when they need it most.

Listening to Students: What the Feedback Tells Us

Numbers matter, but so does the student experience. In the 2023/24 academic year, we received 1,383 feedback responses from students, with an average rating of 4.2 stars out of 5 for the case management teams. This kind of direct feedback is essential—it’s a clear indicator that we’re not just responding quickly but that the quality of our support is hitting the mark.

In the 2023/24 academic year, we received 1,383 feedback responses from students, with an average rating of 4.2 stars out of 5 for the case management teams.

Equally telling is our Net Promoter Score (NPS) for Student Services Online, which reached 43 in 2023/24. For anyone unfamiliar with NPS, scores over 30 are considered strong, and scores above 50 are exceptional. An NPS of 43 tells us that students trust the system and are likely to recommend it to their peers—a critical measure of success in a world where the student experience is increasingly central to university life.

Empowering Students Through Self-Service

A key aspect of our digital transformation has been the rise of self-service. We’ve built a vast repository of knowledge articles—well-researched and thoughtfully written resources that help students find answers on their own. And they’re using it. In 2023/24, we saw 3 million unique views of these articles—a 619% growth from our first year. For each case generated, there were 74 article views, compared to just 13 views per case in our first year—a 469% increase.

This shift validates a core hypothesis behind our CRM approach: by enabling students to solve simple issues themselves, we free up our teams to focus on more intricate, challenging cases—exactly where their time and expertise are needed most.

This shift to self-service is crucial. It empowers students to take control of their own support needs, but it also frees up staff to focus on more complex cases. This is exactly what we’ve seen play out: the number of low-complexity cases—those easily resolved through basic inquiries—has almost halved, from 17% in 2019/20 to 9% in 2023/24.

At the same time, high-complexity cases have more than tripled over the same period, rising from 5% to 17%. This shift validates a core hypothesis behind our CRM approach: by enabling students to solve simple issues themselves, we free up our teams to focus on more intricate, challenging cases—exactly where their time and expertise are needed most.

AI on the Horizon: The Next Leap Forward

There’s no question that AI will play a pivotal role in the next phase of student support. We’re already working on integrating Microsoft Copilot, among other AI tools, into our system to create more personalized, predictive support for students.

it’s about providing predictive analytics that can alert students and their tutors to potential challenges before they escalate, allowing for early intervention and a more proactive approach to academic success.

But for now, these developments remain behind the curtain. While we can’t yet share the full scope of what’s to come, we’re excited about the potential of AI to reshape how students interact with their university—and how we support them throughout their academic journey.

As we look ahead, the next step is to extend the CRM’s reach into the faculty domain. Our vision is to integrate academic performance metrics with the student support system. But this is about more than just tracking grades—it’s about providing predictive analytics that can alert students and their tutors to potential challenges before they escalate, allowing for early intervention and a more proactive approach to academic success.

The Bigger Picture: Building for the Future

What we’ve done at King’s isn’t just about digitizing support services—it’s about fundamentally rethinking how we help students succeed. The DISS team has built the product, but the real impact is in how it’s used by services across the university. By streamlining the simpler tasks, we allow human expertise to focus where it’s needed most, creating a more responsive, supportive environment for students.

There’s still work to be done. We need to extend CRM coverage across all areas of the university, and we’re preparing for the next wave of AI-driven innovation. But the foundation is strong, and the future is exciting. The end goal remains the same: to ensure that every student at King’s feels fully connected and belonging—academically, emotionally, and personally—from their first enquiry to their final exam.