IU Internationale Hochschule enrols students at a scale few universities reach. Its admissions and student-services teams work in Salesforce, in German, on cases where the answer decides whether someone starts a degree this term or waits for the next one.
Where Automation Is a Regulated Act
A student emails their transcript with the line “anbei mein Zeugnis” — attached is my certificate — and no application on file. The correct handling is not a friendly reply. It is recognising that the case belongs to the recognition team and moving it there.
Other cases turn on a date. A student asking when a grade will be published is in scope if the correction window is still open and out of scope the moment it has passed, and those two situations need different outcomes.
And some are genuinely contested. A Widerspruch — a formal objection to a recognition decision — is hard to separate in German from someone simply expressing disagreement, and getting that wrong has consequences for the student.
Drafting Inside Salesforce, Never Sending Alone
Open works IU’s cases inside Salesforce. It reads applicant documents on demand, writes its answer back as a draft, and surfaces it in the interface for an agent to approve before anything reaches the student.
Where the right action is routing rather than replying, it routes. A recognition case arriving with documents attached is reassigned to the recognition team with owner, type, and topic set, and no message sent — because a reply would be the wrong move.
It closes what is genuinely finished: a grade query inside the correction window, a student redirected to the online application portal. It can send the recognition form itself, and attachments along with it.
What it hands over is defined rather than discovered. Documents needing individual academic judgement, grade queries past the correction deadline, and anything falling under the Act’s high-risk categories go to a named department team.
The Results
Live on the admissions track, in production and in hardening:
| Metric | Impact |
|---|---|
| Automation rate | 44% |
| Live track | Admissions |
| Channels covered | Salesforce case comments |
| Handoff destination | IU department teams |
The measure here is not a deflection percentage. It is whether an agent opens a case already drafted, correctly routed, and with the documents read — and whether the reply a student eventually receives was approved by a person. A second track covering recognitions, finance, examinations, and the student office is built and running in staging, with roughly 120,000 application tickets a year in scope.
The Impact
Admissions support that drafts, routes, and closes inside the system IU already runs, without an autonomous send anywhere in it. Salesforce stayed; nothing was migrated.
For the applicant, the difference is a reply that arrives sooner and lands with the right team the first time. For IU, it is automation that fits a regulated process instead of asking the process to move.
