Getting lot of inquiries regarding Programs and Courses from your website? Worried about how to manage the flow of emails and respond to the queries on time?

This was exactly a scenario we had to handle for the CE department of a busy HigherEd institution.

It is a nightmare to handle such cases without a proper system in place. Although many HigherEd institutes use home grown solutions or in house enterprise educational software, it is very essential to have a proper CRM in place that can handle these scenarios at ease. Salesforce is the best answer to this.

The university was using an administrative solution specially designed for continuing education, however there was a need for CRM to handle their entire student’s data to drive campaigns and manage all the enquiries related to their programs/courses. Salesforce was chosen as the CRM.

This simple flow explains the use case implemented for General Website inquiries and how it was integrated with the existing system.

• The existing student data in the administrative system is periodically synced with Salesforce CRM and is connected through the student id (external id in salesforce) in the existing system.
• There is bi-directional data flow between the systems and both the systems maintain the unique identifiers of the connected system.
• However, the existing administrative system was considered as the data source.
• All students in existing system are Contacts in Salesforce.
• For scenarios, where Student Id from administrative system is sent but Contact record does not exist in Salesforce, Contact is created and information is sent from Salesforce to existing system for data sync.

Salesforce gives you the flexibility to build your own processes for managing student’s information by simple point and click. With the release of criteria based processes in Summer 16, it has become much easier to build customized processes.