I anticipated this product for so long. I was so excited. When we first heard that this was coming out, and it was being developed, I wasnÕt just thinking about my office, I was thinking about across the campus. How are we going to use this?

Welcome to Focus, a podcast dedicated to the business of Higher Education. I'm your host, Heather Richmond, and we will be exploring the challenges and opportunities facing today's higher learning institutions. Today, I am joined by Kevin Smith from Canisius University, to discuss how the recent launch of Student Account Advisor expanded the reach of their one-stop shop, evolving their approach to advising students. 

Hi, Kevin, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I am so excited to hear about all that's happening at Canisius University.

Hi Heather, thank you for having me.

Well, speaking of the word university that's fairly new, can you tell us a little bit about the transition from Canisius College to University?

Sure, it went really well, it is exciting here at Canisius to have this name change. A lot of work across campus, including system changes, but it really went well. It became official on August 1. Many schools in New York State have made this change lately. A New York State Department of Education requirement changed on who could be called the college and who could be called the university. And since that change happened, a lot institutions changed to university and it really has allowed us to rebrand, create new logos, and rebrand the institution, as well as help recruit international students.

Yeah, that's great. But again, for the marketing side, that just means a lot of new swag, doesn't it? 

It does. I don't know what to do with all the old stuff, though. But that's okay. 

That's how later people will be able to recognize the tenured folks versus the ones who are new. Well, Kevin, you and I, we've known each other for a really long time but since not everybody knows the Kevin Smith. Let's talk a little bit about your background. 

Sure, and a little bit about Canisius, as well. Canisius is located in a residential neighborhood, outside of downtown Buffalo. We're a private four year liberal arts institution with graduate programs in business education and physician's assistant. We are one of the 27 Jesuit institutions which makes us proud, a lot of tradition there. And our enrollment right now is right around 2700 students, we have about 1900 undergrad and 800 graduate students. I've been here at Canisius for 28 years. Twenty years as Director of Student Accounts, and the last eight years as Assistant Vice President and Director of Student Records and Financial Services. That's our one-stop shop for financial aid, student accounts and records and registration.

Well, again, we've worked together so long, because Canisius has been a TouchNet client for so long. And it's really been exciting for us to be part of your transformational journey, and just seeing that evolution. So let's talk a little bit about all the solutions that you have at TouchNet and kind of that journey. 

Sure, yeah. It's been a great partnership. We started back in 2001. When we went live with Banner, we implemented the accepting of credit cards, and the payment gateway back then. And then in 2006, we implemented Cashiering, the bill payments suite, which includes e-bills, e-refunds, authorized users, payment plans. We also implemented Marketplace which gave us the ability to create online stores and you-pay sites. And then about two years ago, we added the ACH validation product, which we needed to do for regulations. And it was a huge help that TouchNet had that piece we could add on to satisfy the requirement. And then just a half year or so ago, we implemented the Student Account Advisor, which we were really excited about.

That is exciting. So, I know we've talked a lot at TouchNet about Student Account Advisor and just how that's going to really transform some of the one-stop shops, and all these different areas, and how you're changing on campus and really having the tool to go along with that. So, let's talk about it. With just about six months in, how's that going?

Yeah, we love it. And my staff loves it. As I mentioned earlier, we converted into a one-stop shop around 2017. And this Student Account Advisor was just that last piece, kind of that perfect addition to bring it all together. It was something that I've heard was coming out for the last couple of years. And I was really excited to be able to implement it as soon as possible.

Well, that's great. And again, like you said, it just really goes along with how we originally thought of having the one-stop shop as a physical on-campus location. But then what we saw was there really wasn't a tool that matched that, because even though you have the one-stop shop, your cashiers or others would have to go to three different screens. I have to go get financial aid and Banner, but I have to look at the payment and TouchNet. And I have to go over here to see card information. So really seeing that all come together and have a tool for it, that is exciting. But, the word one-stop shop means something different, I've noticed over the last few years, at different universities. So, can you talk a little bit about what it means on your campus, and then how you're expanding that? 

Sure, it really simplified the student transaction for our office and for the student records and financial service center. To start with, it simplified the transaction. It created a true one-stop shop experience that enabled the users to assist students and parents when discussing financial aid, student accounts, and academic data points that are crucial in a student's success. It pulls information from all different platforms, which was a big plus. So, it pulls information from your SIS systems, whether that's Banner, or whatever. We use Banner, so it pulls information from Banner, and all different areas of Banner. The financial aid area, the student accounts area, the academic registration area, etc. As well as pulling information from the TouchNet systems, bill payments suite, things like that. It pulls all that information into a clear, concise solution. We found it a great tool that improves the student experience, the student engagement, and helps with student retention as well. And for the staff in our office, it really simplified it for them. They were going into multiple screens, looking at the information. And even within Banner, you're going into the financial aid screen, you're going into the student account screens, academic screens, and have to remember to give everyone access to all these screens and to give access as a Ôlook onlyÕ, as an Ôupdate onlyÕ, and screens have sensitive information on them, so then you have to limit those screens, it really gets a little complicated. So with this product, it pulls all that information on one screen, and it doesn't pull any of the sensitive information right on it. And you also have authorization control too with the Advisor where you could give certain people more access than others. So it really has helped the staff not have to look at so many screens for the same information.

That's wonderful. And again, the goal was obviously to simplify for the student experience in terms of having a central one-stop shop, but then having the benefit of centralizing it all for your staff. That's just a win win across the board. So now you've been using it for a few months and getting everybody up to speed, what have you found to be most surprising?

Yeah, it's interesting when I think about what surprised me about the product. I anticipated this product for so long, I was so excited. When we first heard that this was coming out, and it was being developed, I wasnÕt just thinking about my office, I was thinking about across the campus. How are we going to use this? I had been part of a student retention committee here at Canisius for many years, so I'm always thinking about student success and retention and how we can improve that across campus. So when I thought about this, I envisioned it being used beyond the physical virtual one-stop here in my area. Students services is always skeptical about providing outside offices with access to student accounts or financial aid data because of the sensitive nature of the data, but I envision this is something we could really push out to other offices across campus and help them help the students.

Such an interesting perspective, because obviously, as we're building technology, we're thinking of all the different use cases. And we were really focused in on how to provide a tool for the one-stop shop. And especially then, the pandemic, and we started seeing the one-stop shop concept be virtual, then you definitely need a tool to support that. But thinking beyond that one-stop shop or even beyond the business office, that's definitely a use case I hadn't thought about before and youÕve really taking advantage of that. So I'm super excited to talk about that. So let's kind of dive into how are you expanding across campus? 

Yeah, it's my expansion plan, I call it here. We obviously started within the one-stop shop. But I think even other campuses that have one-stop shops, you don't always give everyone in your one-stop shop access to everything. We sometimes have a set of four or five or six people who are interacting with students on a regular basis. You want them to have access to many different forms, a lot of different information, so they can assist as best they can with some of the initial questions that a student might have. You want to have that information available to them, right there in front of them, so they can assist with those questions. And then some of the others in the office, maybe the back part of the office, may not have had access to all this information because they were mainly working on student accounts responsibilities, mainly working on financial aid responsibilities, or records and registration responsibilities. We often didn't take the time to give them access, someone who was mainly working on financial aid, do we really need to give them access to all the student account screens and things like that? But here, the first thing we did, we gave everybody access to this. And going back a little bit, we wouldn't give everyone access, like the bill payments, because everyone didn't need to know, wasn't authorized user setup, or they had a payment plan. Some of the back office people didn't really need to know that. But with this product, it's so easy to give everyone access to it, then everyone can see all of this information. So if someone who usually works with someone on financial aid items, they can quickly see is their bill paid, are they on a payment plan, those type of things can be easily looked at and then they can help them. So that was the first thing, to make sure everyone here in the center had access and knew how to navigate through it. And then we went to our Griff Center, which is our one-stop shop for advising, tutoring, mentoring, career success coaching. Many of them meet students one-on-one on a regular, ongoing basis and we thought it was important to give them access as well, which we never would give them access to a Banner financial aid screen like that before. But now we can. And now they can then better help the student as they're sitting down with them, whether they're advising them on registration for the next semester, or the students having maybe just some issues academically, as they're meeting with them, they can look at Student Account Advisor. And, if there are any red flags there, are there any holes, are there any balances? Even though the student may not have come in to talk about that. They can bring those things up to the student. And they're an extension of our office where they can then say, did you know you have a hold? Did you know you have a balance? You're not going to register. So, then there's just another touch point. The students often ignore our emails and our communications, but hopefully they won't ignore someone sitting in front of them saying, you should go talk to someone about that hold. 

Yeah, itÕs also that continued student experience where it's all about personalization. If you're sitting there face-to-face, and I know things about you, about your account, it just helps students to be like, you actually know about me and you care about me. And I think that actually helps improve the student experience too, don't you think?

Yes. And we have a motto here of helping the whole person. ItÕs not my job to just help them with their bill or financial aid, while you're talking to them about another concern or an issue that you can help them with. So, the Griff Center, weÕve done the training there. And then next, I trained a couple of directors of some of our specialty Co-Op programs. And these, we have programs under graduate programs, and opportunity program within New York State. A couple of these programs built in are mentoring and one-on-one advising, just to help the students be successful. I looked at any program that had a lot of contact with students, and these two programs met that criteria. So I trained the directors of those two programs, because theyÕre meeting with the students on going. It can only help again, when they're meeting with the students on academic or some other situation that they can see the full picture of the student. I havenÕt done this yet, but next will be associate Deans. Our Associate Deans on campus meet with students that maybe have met with their advisor chair, and now they have to meet with their Associate Dean about something that could be an academic probation, or it could be many issues. And, we thought that it would be great for them to have this product. So they could see, as they're talking to a student, maybe about academic probation, or their financial aid situation? What's their student account situation? And, that could play into what type of decisions are made, what type of plan is made with that student, to help them be successful academically, financially, and be able to be retained and stay on campus. 

Yeah, that's really smart. And I think your approach of, as I'm identifying across campus, who has the most contact with students, and how do we help them? And I think it also helps, even within the departments to feel like you're more unified. And I know a lot of times the financial aid office or the athletics office don't talk and having this single tool and saying, Ôhey, I want to train you on this to make sure we have a better student experienceÕ is really bringing some good collaboration between the different departments on campus.

It does. I chair the Academic Affairs Working Group. And we meet every two weeks, and we bring people from directors of academic programs, to Associate Deans, financial aid, and have a group across campus together, where we talk about these things, and how we can better assist the students. So that whole group will have access to the Student Account Advisor as well. And it's just an effort to see the whole student and system to be successful.

That's great. So now, these other groups, you've expanded, and some groups have been actively using Student Account Advisor, what are they finding the most valuable?

Yeah, I think many of you have maybe heard this. Students success, or student retention is not just one office whoÕs responsible these days, it's everyone's responsibility across our campuses. And, another piece of this, I've always heard too, is that to retain a student is cheaper than it is to recruit a new one. So many of us are going through a recruiter, enrollment declines, because of the demographics, and all that, especially in the northeast it's very important because we're not going to be able to enroll as many students, we're going to have to retain more. So retention success is very important. Advisor enables these offices to support the students, where the student is and as best as possible. They can see why a student might not be registered: do they have a hold, do they have a balance, did they miss their last payment in their payment plan? It shows authorized users if you have a student who you're having a conversation with a student about mom or dad or someone, and the advisor can look in the system and say, well, you don't have any authorized user setup, maybe set them up as an authorized user. Might help them view the bill or view the account and help make payments, right? And able to assist. So it's given those students help along there. I think that's what has been most valuable with pushing it out across campus.

Yeah, that's great. And so I want to flip back to you, because you've now expanded this across campus. But I'm going to assume that there's really probably been a lot of benefits to Student Financial Services in general and how they're managed. So by having other offices and leaders being able to see the student account, what have you really seen the benefit for your office?

Yeah, really has. Just the referrals back to our office, if they see something, they know they can at least tell the student what the situation is, they have a hold, this is the hold type. Now you have that information to go back to the student records and financial services center to talk to them. With that piece of information in hand, students aren't just showing up and not knowing what they need. And often, what we've done here at Canisius is, depending on the location, a lot of staff in these offices will even walk a student down to our office and hand them off to us. And let us know that, while meeting with the student, we noticed this balance, we noticed this piece of financial aid hasn't been applied to the student account. You know, and the student just wanted to know why, or how, what they needed, maybe it was a piece of missing information that we still needed to get, so we can disburse the financial aid. So, it really has allowed other offices to answer some of our basic questions and to give the students more information to come with when they have to come to our office. 

Almost like having a human bot for some of those easy questions, before they come to you.

And offices don't mind, we all are doing more with less and all of that. Another tool to help the students. I mean, you're not asking other officers to do your work for you, you're just giving them another tool, access to more information to help the student. 

Absolutely. But with every tool, there is probably some training that has to happen. And I know you've already set up some great training programs. So let's talk about how are you training to be able to use this new tool?

Yeah, so we've done some zoom and in-person training with these other offices, and it's really simplified things. It's one product, easy to navigate between tabs, you're just clicking through student information, you can't break anything, you canÕt change anything, update anything, you're not going to hurt anything, you're not going to affect any Banner information, or any saved information within bill payments. And, itÕs much easier to train than to train on all the possible different Banner screens. How to navigate each of the Banner screens, what information can be viewed. And like we said earlier, with any of the Banner screens, the information that we want to share, there's often a piece of information on there that is sensitive, or maybe one click away from that screen, under the tools section, or the section enables you to bounce back and forth between forms, may have some sensitive information. So this kind of eliminates that issue of the sensitive information piece. And then if you wanted to give others access to some of the online student accounts, the bill payment information, that was a whole other system you had to train someone on. So, by having it all pulled into one platform, it really simplified it for us and others on campus. 

Yeah, that's great. I know, we were talking originally, Kevin, in my mind, it was almost providing the Ôyou can look, but you can't touchÕ methodology with this Advisor. Because you're right, if you give access, you have to be really careful of who you're giving access to, is there Ôview onlyÕ mode or in some instances, you can't designate that so all of a sudden you've given access to edit something that you maybe didn't want to let anybody do. But just to be able to see that information and really advise the student, that's the whole point of Advisor. 

That's right. 

That's awesome. Well, I know, part of Adviser also has the ability, once you've had this conversation with the student to be able to communicate back and send a recap of our conversation. So you're new to this, I'm not sure if you've been able to take advantage of the communications piece yet or not.

Yeah, it was, again, another piece of it that I was excited to have. We do have a homegrown system that does more academic, doesn't include any financial aid or student account information. So it was a homegrown kind of platform to assist with academic advising of students. And with that platform, they built a communication module, which helps communicate to students. But I think with this system, the idea is to then move away from the homegrown system and utilize Student Advisor more. What I like about that system, and what Student Advisor can do, is you can create templates of messages. So the different areas, you may have given access to Student Advisor to can create specific templates of an email you send out to students on a regular basis. And you can create that template and then, while you're viewing that student, you can easily click on that template and shoot an email to that student on time, right away. And then it saves that communication too, so you could see what communications you've sent out to that student. And you could always, on the fly, create a new communication and send it out as well. But just having the place that you can do that when you're viewing the student - it saves it, it's all right there, and then you can go back to it and see what you've sent the student - Yeah, it is a huge benefit to outreach to students. And because you can never get too many communications.

Now, if we can only figure out the tool to make them read it. 

Read it. That's right. I can't wait to figure that out. 

Okay. Yeah, that's next on the list, added to the roadmap. That's awesome. Well, I would say especially because how you're using Advisor, which is so cool, and unique, and having the different departments tying that to the template, so that again, it feels like, I was over here and got information, and when I get the communication, it's from that same group. So it ties it all together, again, back to a better student experience. Right?

That's right. 

That's great. Well, Kevin, I just am blown away, I cannot believe that you've only had this really up and going for half a year, and everything that you've done and expanding it across campus. That's awesome. So, you're just getting started?

That's right, yeah, we'll keep training and we'll keep pushing out to other offices, we're excited. Let's do an Advisor that Cashiering is a piece of it, or will be soon and we don't have that piece implemented. But you know, that's just one other piece of another platform that can be incorporated into Student Advisor, Cashiering. So then for our cashiers, that's one less system they need to go into. We're excited about that, and then just keep rolling it out to other offices. So IÕm just continuing to think, what other offices on campus or what other staff on campus interact with students on a regular basis? I think about residence life, they're often meeting with students on the housing situation. So, it might be beneficial to them. Maybe academic advisors, depending on each institution is set up a little bit different on academic affairs, or sometimes you have an advisement center. But you also have often an academic advisor within their major. Okay, so then we start rolling that out to advisors in academic departments, would probably be the next step. 

That will be great. That kind of starts to bridge that gap. A lot of times it's been very siloed. Like, this is academic side of the house, this is business side of the house and look at you integrating the two sides. 

Yeah. 

That is great. Well, I'm sure that everybody listening is going wow, I need to do that too. So anybody who's thinking about replicating what you've done any advice that you have for them?

Yeah, I would think overall, like we talked about earlier, the importance of student success and retention, I think, each of us needs to do as much as we can for each student each time we meet and talk with them, addressing as many situations, issues the students may have and kind of one-stop when you're meeting or talking with them. And to cut down on referring students to other offices because you don't have the tools in front of you to help that student. And so I think Student Account Advisor really helps to solve that problem. 

That's awesome. Well, Kevin, this has been so great. We could keep talking all day long about this. I love just hearing how you not only had a new solution, but already are maximizing its use across campus and looking for new ways. So thank you again, so much for sharing with our audience.

Thank you Heather, thanks for having me.

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