Supernova Award Category

The Problem

Blackboard’s company objective is to make learning more desirable, accessible, and meaningful for learners, partnering with teachers, administrators, and leaders to improve outcomes. To ensure close communication among more than 19,000 clients in 100 countries, including 1,900 international institutions, the company had to deliver improved customer support and maintain product quality as the it continued to expand. The challenge they had was working with a highly customized environment,  integrating Salesforce, ServiceNow and JIRA to engage with customers in a whole new way.

The Solution

Blackboard uses Salesforce to provide a single customer view for tracking and resolving customer queries. Implementing MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform with the Salesforce environment, Blackboard is able to ensure real-time flow of customer information for passing product development requests into JIRA or IT service management requests into ServiceNow.

The results

Blackboard has taken on several initiatives with MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform. The first was integrating Salesforce and ServiceNow to enable the organization to eliminate manual data entry, reduce mistakes and facilitate more rapid fulfillments.

Another initiative was integrating Salesforce and JIRA, which is expected to reduce support costs by increasing efficiency and avoiding incremental labor requirements. In addition, Blackboard expects client satisfaction, retention and support of its SaaS delivery to be greatly enhanced.

Leveraging Anypoint Platform as part of its responsive approach in addressing customer needs, the results were quicker development cycles leading to faster innovation and increased transparency among Blackboard’s internal product team and customers. Blackboard’s software is able to facilitate faster connections for its global clients, including teachers, students, parents and administrators, and optimize Internet-based assignments, class websites and online collaboration with classmates. Overall, Anypoint Platform enabled Blackboard to shift its focus to improving customer experience and accelerating growth in an increasingly digital world.

Metrics

Since implementing MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, connecting Salesforce with Blackboard’s IT infrastructure has allowed the company to transform from an analog to a digital business and deliver new learning experiences. For each fulfillment request, Blackboard is projected to save 20 to 30 minutes which includes several steps of collecting, forming, and then manually entering data into another system. This does not take into account the actual provisioning work.

The Salesforce and JIRA initiative to decrease support cost with MuleSoft being the connectivity backbone is also projected to have a net benefit of more than $1,000,000 per year. Overall, MuleSoft’s technology has enabled Blackboard to improve the experience of educators, students and administrators in a modern day classroom.

The Technology

Blackboard’s software includes transaction, community and payment management tools that enable students to use their college IDs for meal plans, event access, tuition payments and much more.

Since implementing MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, Blackboard is able to easily connect Salesforce, Jira, ServiceNow and HTTP/HTTPS on a single platform to transform how it provides world-class experiences across its global client database.

Disruptive Factor

Blackboard aims to enhance, simplify, and create new methods to increase transparency among its team and customers. With MuleSoft, Blackboard is connecting siloed endpoints to deliver consistency, transform learning experiences and online collaboration, and create a more personalized interactions for users. The company enables schools to create Internet-based learning programs and communities.

Shining Moment

The shining moment for the organization came from evolving from an analog business to a digital one. Blackboard was able to automate business processes and be proactive with customer service and product delivery. MuleSoft has enabled Blackboard to drive significant business value and place an infrastructure foundation on which new initiatives are built, such as a revamping its learning management platform and launching Blackboard Learn, a portal for students to access data.