THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA STORY

Trellis: University of Arizona’s Shared Platform for Back-Office Tasks, Student Service, and Campus Engagement

Higher ed transformation often fails because the people tasked with using new applications and their mission-critical workflows are stranded between traditional training, disorganized documentation, and lengthy ticket queues. The University of Arizona (UoA)’s IT team faced these challenges with its Trellis application, a campus-wide application built on Salesforce CRM that unified back-office administrative workflows, student services, and campus-wide engagement.

Trellis was built to unite staff and streamline engagement services for students, employees, and the broader community, with a focus on student success, personalized digital experiences, and improved data management across departments. It facilitates a broad range of campus activities and operations, with examples such as student services and scheduling, admin CRM and email marketing, and faculty-to-student communication.

“Trellis advances the University’s Strategic Imperatives by uniting staff on a shared Salesforce platform that streamlines engagement services for students, employees, and the broader community.” says the UoA’s IT department on its Trellis about page.

UoA needed a modern solution to serve as an operating model for managing Trellis enablement adoption across its student, faculty, and admin staff user cohorts, and invested in in-workflow enablement so campus teams could execute consistently as the program scaled.

Whatfix became the enablement layer within Trellis and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, enabling support and adoption within the flow of work, with cohort-based guidance and support (across students, faculty, and admin staff) backed by real usage signals.

THE CHALLENGE

Accelerating Trellis Training for New Admin Staff & Providing Hypercare Support for Existing Users

UofA needed Trellis and Salesforce Marketing Cloud to deliver on its ROI promise, which presented unique user enablement challenges across onboarding, training, and support, all without overwhelming its IT and support functions.

Kayli Hill, Support and Technologies Adoption Specialist at the University of Arizona, was tasked with managing the Trellis enablement and product team. They measured success through ticket deflection and support reduction, with a clear priority: reduce bug tickets and limit the operational drag caused by users getting stuck and escalating issues.

They also needed visibility into what users were doing and where friction was building, then a way to turn that insight into targeted guidance. That is where a DAP earns its keep in higher ed: fewer ad hoc trainings, fewer avoidable tickets, and fewer “tribal knowledge” handoffs.

THE SOLUTION

Operationalizing User Adoption: Trellis Guidance, Self-Help Support, and Workflow Governance in One Layer

UofA deployed Whatfix across both Trellis and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Inside Trellis, it delivered contextual guidance and support using Whatfix in-app experiences (i.e., Self Help, Flows, Smart Tips, Pop-Ups, and Beacons) and tracked adoption through engagement analytics.

In the Q425, Trellis recorded 631 Self Help queries served, 434 Flows played, 37,384 Smart Tips shown, 2,447 Pop-Ups engaged, and 6,264 Beacons engaged for a total of 382,629 user engagements that helped to streamline workflows, eliminate support dependencies, and drive overall system ROI.

It extended the program into Salesforce Marketing Cloud, supporting a second set of workflows and use cases. Over the same period, Marketing Cloud recorded 253 Self Help queries served, 306 Flows played, 128 Smart Tips shown, 49 Pop-Ups engaged, and 336 Beacons engaged.

Operationally, the engagement covered both campaign-related and program management use cases in Trellis, plus Marketing Cloud workflow support, including live guidance around key IT tasks and prompting users to update key fields after business changes.

“Whatfix is the in-app guidance system that overlays Trellis and provides our users on-demand support for processes right on the page they are on. [It helps] ignite a spark of knowledge that leaves our users feeling confident and empowered with all our products,” said Hill.

THE RESULTS

Accelerating User Readiness, Stabilizing Support Tickets, and Measurable Adoption Improvements

UofA tied value to support outcomes and the lived experience of the campus teams responsible for reporting Trellis adoption and optimizing its workflows. Hill reports measurable improvements across its Trellis enablement and product improvement goals, including fewer bug tickets and higher user satisfaction, as well as a better day-to-day experience for its support team, with less time spent reacting to avoidable issues.

With Whatfix, the team also reduced reliance on synchronous training. UofA attributes 96 hours of live training to in-app guided onboarding and training, plus improved visibility into real user experiences and progress, driven by data-driven insights that lead to measurable improvements.

UofA continues investing in in-workflow knowledge delivery, including integrating its new GenAI chatbot into Whatfix Self Help on Trellis to provide intelligent, contextual assistance within the application experience.