ThinkEDU - Putting Privacy First

About ThinkEDU

Selling software and hardware products to students and faculty for over a decade, ThinkEDU is a leader in the academic retail space. Knowing their customers now place more importance on user privacy and data protection led the company to reevaluate the practices of their third-party vendors.

They discovered their existing academic verification service provider was requesting sensitive data like birthdates and social security number information. This raised concerns of not only potential data and privacy risks, but requesting personal information was negatively impacting order completion rates.

Discovering that Proxi.id was a drop-in replacement to their existing verification solution and put end user privacy first, made the switch an easy decision. Switching to Proxi.id reduced their service costs, increased order completion rates, improved user satisfaction, and reduced data compliance risks.

“Proxi.id makes everything easy. Other providers make things more complicated than they should be." - Allan Fischler COO, ThinkEDU

Academic Verification Challenge

ThinkEDU needs to verify the academic status of customers for most of the items they sell. The company had previously engaged a standalone verification service which was integrated with their ecommerce platform.

Despite the growth of ThinkEDU’s business and an increased utilization of the service, they saw regular increases in ‘per verification’ fees without an increase in service levels. The service provider was not upgrading their product to leverage modern verification technologies, like single sign-on, and required users to create accounts and submit personally identifiable information (PII) such as their birthdate or social security number for verification.

Choosing Proxi.id

ThinkEDU wanted to focus on their core business instead of manually verifying academic users, and other service providers were similarly asking for excessive personal information or requiring users to create accounts to conduct verifications.

“Many verification service providers make users jump through hoops to verify their academic status. We were excited to find a solution that made it easy for users and checked all our boxes.”

Then ThinkEDU discovered Proxi.id. They were thrilled to find a service provider that met all their requirements. With Proxi.id, users can verify their academic status without providing personally identifiable information. Proxi.id’s academic verification service leverages the latest single sign-on (SSO) technologies for academic end user verification, enabling users to verify by signing-in to their own college or university portal using their institutional credentials. No personal or sensitive information is collected or shared as part of the process and there’s no requirement to create an account with Proxi.id.

Getting Started

Built from the ground up to be privacy-first made it easy for Proxi.id to respond to the challenge, providing ThinkEDU with an academic verification service that met their needs. ThinkEDU was able to split test the Proxi.id service against their existing vendor at no charge and with no commitment for 30 days to determine efficacy.

“Proxi.id was responsive to our questions and helped guide us through technical aspects of setup with our ecommerce platform. This made the transition from our other solution seamless.”

Set up was easy, and integration with ThinkEDU’s ecommerce platform was completed and tested within a couple of days. The team at Proxi.id worked with ThinkEDU at every step to ensure questions were promptly answered and that integration was seamless.

Results

At the conclusion of the pilot, ThinkEDU found that Proxi.id’s service performed better than their existing service provider. A higher number of orders were successfully verified which lowered the burden on their support team. ThinkEDU achieved a cost reduction of over 50% of fees charged by their former service provider. Proxi.id was able to provide a modern, compliance-focused verification service that provides a private and secure experience for ThinkEDU’s customer base of students, teachers, and faculty.

“Proxi.id has made it easy for our customers to verify their academic status. With their service, orders are released faster and we’re able to verify more users.”